“It didn’t have a back and had only two strips of material up the front.” Luc rocked back on his heels and lowered his gaze from the towel wrapped around Jane’s head, down the front of her robe to her bare toes again. Since last night, he’d been thinking about that kiss in her apartment, and he wasn’t certain what had driven him to kiss her. The dress. The lips. Curiosity. All of those. “And the little gold chain hanging down your back was there for only one reason.”
“What? To hypnotize you?”
She was being sarcastic, but she wasn’t that far off. “Maybe not hypnotize, but it’s there so any man seeing it will think about unhooking it.”
She raised one brow and looked at him as if he were an idiot. He sort of felt like an idiot. “I’m telling you the truth. All the guys last night were thinking of unhooking your dress.” None of the guys had mentioned it to Luc, but he figured that if he’d been thinking it, they had too.
“Is this your idea of an apology or your way of rationalizing what happened?” She grabbed the towel from her head and tossed it on her bed.
“It’s a fact.”
She combed her fingers through her hair. “It’s delusional.”
If she were a guy, she’d see the logic in it.
“And it’s stupid.” Her wet curls tangled about her fingers as she pushed them back from her face. “It puts the blame on me, and I didn’t walk into your apartment last night and kiss you. You kissed me.”
“You didn’t protest.” He didn’t know what had shocked him more. Him kissing her, or her response. He never would have guessed that so much passion could be contained in so little a package.
She let out a long sigh as if she were bored. “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”
He laughed even as he wanted to cross the room and press his mouth to hers. To slip his hand inside that robe and cup her breast, even as he knew it was a hell of a bad idea. Luc leaned a hip into the desk as he lowered his gaze from her mouth and thought about how her mouth had tasted last night. He glanced somewhere safe, down at Jane’s laptop. “The way you kissed, I thought you were trying to climb inside me.” An open day planner sat beside the laptop. Several Post-Its were stuck on the inside. A couple of the notes had to do with hockey trivia and questions she wanted to ask for her sports columns.
“There you go, being delusional again.”
On one pink note the words, Feb. 16/Single Girl deadline, were printed. While another read, Honey Pie/make decision by Wednesday at the latest. Honey Pie? Did Jane read Honey Pie? The nympho who humped men into comas? He just couldn’t picture her reading porn. “You were so hot for it,” he said in a slow and deliberate drawl as he looked back up at her, “I could have had you naked in no time.”
“You’re not only conceited beyond belief, and delusional, you’re… you’re deranged!” she sputtered.
“Probably,” he admitted as he walked past her on his way t
o the door. He felt deranged.
“Wait a minute. When do I get the interview you promised me?”
With his hand on the doorknob, he turned and looked at her. “Not now,” he said.
“When?” she pushed.
“Sometime.”
“Sometime tomorrow?” She raised her arms and brushed her hair behind her ears.
“I’ll let you know.”
“You can’t back out on me now.”
He didn’t plan to. He just wasn’t going to do it now. Here. In a hotel room with a king-sized bed and a woman wearing a bathrobe begging him to prove just how deranged he was. “Yeah, says who?”
Her brows lowered and she pinned him with her gaze. “Me.”
He laughed again. He couldn’t help it. She looked like she was gearing up to kick his ass.
“You gave me your word.”
For a split second he thought about shutting her up with his mouth. Kissing her until she turned soft and melted into him again. Until she fed him that little moan of hers that had urged him on last night, to take it further. To touch her where his mind had been taking him since that first morning on the team jet when he’d looked back and seen her.
“When, Luc?”