Horror and guilt gave way to shock and outrage as awareness continued to spit and pop over his skin like wildfire. Whatever she was wearing, it wasn’t doing a damn thing to calm the inferno still raging in his crotch.
‘Dim the lights,’ he demanded of the house’s smart tech system as his mind finally caught up with his cartwheeling emotions and his torched libido.
Was this some kind of a sick prank, or worse, an attempt at blackmail?
‘Who are you?’ he demanded as his temper gathered pace.
Whoever she was, it was not his fault he’d touched her. Kissed her. Caressed her... Good God, begged her to stroke him to orgasm... Shame washed over him and the erection finally began to soften.
He cut off the thought of what he’d almost done. He’d been virtually comatose. And he was the one who was naked. And he’d stopped the minute he’d woken up enough to figure out what was going on.
And this was his bed, in his place.
The lights dipped as requested, the only sound her laboured breathing and his thundering heartbeat as he slowly lowered his arm. He waited for his flaming eyeballs to adjust to the half-light. He couldn’t see her properly, his myopia turning her into a series of fuzzy, indistinct shapes. But somehow, even without being able to make out too many details, he could sense her vibrant, vivid beauty—not classy and fragile like Beatrice’s but raw and real and way too sensual. The earthy, spicy scent tinged with the ripe aroma of a summer orchard still permeated the room. Not a hallucination, then, but the smell of her.
Other memories flashed back to torment him. The feel of her lush curves—satin and silk against his fingertips—the taste of her still lingering on his tongue—heady and sweet and more addictive than a class A drug.
He thrust clumsy fingers through his hair.
‘What the hell are you doing hiding in my bed?’ he demanded when she didn’t speak, letting every ounce of his outrage and frustration vibrate through the words. ‘In the middle of the night...disguised as a Victorian hooker?’
‘I’m not dressed as a hooker. This is a Little Red Riding Hood outfit!’ The inane reply stumbled out of Katie’s mouth, her whole body still vibrating from the shock of Jack Wolfe’s touch. Firm, forceful, electrifying. Her mind still reeled from being catapulted out of heaven and into hell in one second flat.
Unfortunately, her body had not got the memo—that she was now in the most compromising, mortifying position she had ever found herself in in her entire life—and that was saying something for someone who had earned a living as a children’s entertainer for the past five years.
Her nipples were hard enough to drill through steel and the weight in her sex felt like a hot, heavy brick throbbing in time to her frantic heartbeat.
She’d been fast asleep, dreaming of him... Or so she’d thought. But now her panicked gaze devoured the man himself.
Jack Wolfe, in all his glory.
The snapped photos had not done him justice. Sitting up in his bed with a sheet thrown over the mammoth erection she’d had in her hand only moments before, Jack Wolfe was a smorgasbord of hotness laid out before her on thousand-thread-count sheets.
Her shocked gaze took in every inch of him in the softened lighting. The muscular chest, the broad shoulders, the swirling tattoo of a howling wolf which flared over one shoulder blade and across his left pec—only partially obscured by the sprinkle of chest hair that surrounded his nipples and arrowed down through washboard abs.
She jerked her gaze back up before it could land once again on the tent in his lap.
His eyes narrowed, or rather squinted, and she had the weirdest feeling he couldn’t quite see her. His glare didn’t alter as she took in the full masculine beauty of his face.
All sharp angles and sensual lines, his bone structure was perfectly symmetrical except for a bump on the bridge of his nose. And the livid scar which sliced through his eyebrow and marred his right cheek. His eyes were a startling, pure almost translucent blue with a dark rim around the edges. And horribly bloodshot.
She noted the other signs of fatigue: the bruised shadows under his eyes, the drawn lines around his mouth. Sympathy and guilt joined the tangle of emotions making her stomach pitch and roll. But at least it went some way to stem the flood of sensation.
‘I don’t give a damn who you’re disguised as,’ he finally snarled, the sharp tone cutting through the charged silence with the precision of a scalpel. ‘I want to know what you’re doing in my bed waiting to jump me in the middle of the night!’
‘I... I fell asleep.’
‘Well, duh...’ The sneer broke through her shock and shame to tap into her own indignation—which had completely malfunctioned in the face of his extreme hotness.
However hot he was, she was not the one who had initiated Kiss-mageddon. Even sound asleep she’d known that was him. His firm touch skimming over her curves, cupping her breasts, tightening her nipples to...
She swallowed.
Focus, Katie, for goodness’ sake.
‘I didn’t jump you...you jumped me,’ she managed.
He scraped his fingers through his hair, pushing the short, damp waves into haphazard spikes. ‘Fine, we’re even there,’ he said, the growled concession surprising her a little. Even naked—especially naked—he didn’t look like the type of guy who backed down often. ‘But I still don’t know who the hell you are or what you’re doing in my penthouse dressed as a porno version of Red Riding Hood!’
Porno...? What the...?
‘This costume’s not pornographic. It’s not even revealing!’ she all but yelped, her own outrage finally coming to the fore. Of all the... ‘I wear this outfit to read fairy tales to four-year-olds and I’ve never had any complaints.’
His burning, bloodshot gaze skated over her and drowned her outrage in another flood of unwanted sensation. Drat the man. ‘I expect their fathers enjoy the show even more than they do.’
She sputtered.