‘So?’ she prompted again, actually more curious than she wanted to admit. ‘Where do you find the time? Not to mention the stamina?’
He watched her, his gaze taking on a challenging glow, and the reckless thrill made her pulse leap.
Game on.
‘The time and the stamina’s easy to find, because while I’m socialising I’m usually working as well. Anjelique’s father is a close friend of the governor’s and I wanted an introduction to expedite a zoning request that the city council had been sitting on for months.’ The smile he sent her was smug and completely unrepentant. ‘In the South, mixing business with pleasure is the only way to get things done.’
‘That sounds exhausting,’ she said—and remarkably cynical. Had Anjelique realised he was dating her to expedite a zoning request?
‘Not necessarily,’ he murmured, his voice husky.
‘How so?’
‘Because I don’t sleep with every woman I date.’
‘Ah, I see.’ She felt her cheeks heat. She hadn’t expected him to be quite that blunt. Or for the admission to please her quite so much. But she quashed the burning desire to ask him directly if he’d slept with Anjelique. ‘That’s a relief.’
‘It is?’ he asked, lifting her hand from the bar to toy with her fingers. ‘Why is that?’
The heat shot straight up her arm and joined the tingles migrating up her spine.
She tugged her fingers out of his. Damn, she’d walked right into that one. She certainly didn’t want him thinking she was that interested in his love life. ‘Because sleeping with someone to expedite a zoning request doesn’t seem terribly romantic,’ she remarked, struggling for flippant while her knickers were dampening with need.
‘Uh-huh. When did you start thinking sex has anything to do with romance?’
When I slept with you.
She erased the foolish thought, and the silly spurt of vulnerability that came with it, and dipped her head to peer into her half-finished Cosmo.
Where had that come from? It wasn’t even true—their night together had been hot and reckless and exhilarating, but ultimately wrong. Proving that even she had the capacity to confuse sex with romance. She pushed the drink away. Especially when she’d had too much to drink.
‘I don’t,’ she replied, ignoring the blip in her heart rate at the intense watchfulness in his gaze. ‘But maybe Anjelique does.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ he replied. ‘Because I’ve never had sex with Anjelique.’
She tramped down on the idiotic surge of adrenaline. And decided she was definitely finished with her alcohol intake for the night.
But jolted, when he covered her hand, brushed his thumb across the knuckles. ‘You, on the other hand...’
Her eyes met his and she felt a little dizzy—mesmerised by the cool blue of his irises.
‘You wanna know the one thing I remember real clear from that night?’ he murmured.
She shook her head, knowing she didn’t want to know, especially not in that low seductive growl that was setting sparks off all over her sex-starved body.
‘However wrong we were for doing it, it felt right while it lasted.’
Her pulse rate accelerated at the forceful tone. ‘I don’t think we should talk about that,’ she whispered, her voice faltering along with her resistance. ‘It’s a really bad idea.’
He climbed off his stool, and pressed his hand to her back—making the tingles hit meltdown as he rubbed the slinky silk over sensitised skin. He hooked her hair behind her ear and leaned in to whisper against her lobe. ‘Bad ideas can lead to awesome sex.’
She shuddered, not caring any more that she was sitting in a public bar, or that she wanted to stretch against his palms like a contented cat.
‘And it’s not wrong any more,’ he murmured, his breath hot and seductive against her ear.
She raised her head. ‘Are you sure about that?’ she said a little breathlessly, as it occurred to her just how far removed the Carter who stood before her now was from the innocent man she’d once seduced, if that cocksure look was anything to go by.
‘I’m not dating right now—are you?’ he said, deliberately misinterpreting the question.