Flirting With Disaster (16 page)

“No, honey, I could tell that by watching him look at you. That man wants to nail you to
the nearest flat surface.”

“You think?” she asked, glancing over at Sean again. He was running one hand through his hair, completely absorbed in his work. His hair was getting unruly. If he kept working for a few more hours, it would be sticking up all over the place by bedtime. No wonder he kept it so short.

“Aww,” Judah said. “That’s sweet.”

“What’s sweet?” she asked, only half paying attention because Sean was still distracting her with the way he slumped when he worked on the computer. Like a seventeen-year-old boy. She wanted to find him a desk and give him a lecture on ergonomics. But not as much as she wanted to watch him and think about how hot he was.

“You’re a goner.”

That got her attention. “No, I’m not. I hardly know him.”

“You are, too.”

“I’m not,” she insisted. “I haven’t even slept with him. And if I did, it would be a just-for-fun thing. Like you were going to be, until you went all gay on me.”

Judah smiled his lady-killer smile and said, “I’m not
all
gay. I’m at least twenty percent straight.”

“Okay,” she said, “now we’re getting somewhere. I want to hear about that twenty percent, and then I want to hear about the other eighty. Tell me all your dirty little secrets, Pratt. Help me figure out who wants your head on a platter. Talk.”

“All right. Where do you want me to start?”

“I don’t know. Tell me about your family. You’re an only child, right?”

“Yep. Just me and my parents and a little house in Pella, Iowa. Home of the Tulip Festival, Central College, and Pella Windows and Doors.”

“Sounds wholesome.”

His lip curled. “It
was
.”

“Were you a wholesome kid?”

“For a while. Until I wasn’t anymore.”

“When did you go off the rails?”

He leaned back, crossed his arms behind his head, and started telling her a rehearsed-sounding story about a prank he’d pulled at church when he was twelve. She’d read the same
story in a magazine once, so she let her mind wander a little. She understood that he needed to get warmed up before he told her anything too personal. Everybody did.

It worked this way tending bar, too, or chatting with folks on a hike or on a river. You started with the easy stories and worked your way in.

Meanwhile, the wheels were turning somewhere in the recesses of her brain, and Fretful Katie was doing her thing, tossing out the confidence-lacking, mind-fucking questions she specialized in.
Do you really think you’re the sort of person who can pull off a meaningless fling? It’s not like you’ve ever had one before. Even if Sean does want you, it’s not like you can turn into a different person overnight just because you’re no longer wearing a ring. You think you can sleep with Sean and not fall for him?

Do you even want to?

When the story ended, she laughed on cue and coaxed Judah into telling another one, but she couldn’t keep her head in the game.

It irritated her, because she needed to be good at this, for Judah’s sake and her own. Sean was the last thing she should have been thinking about.

She just couldn’t stop.

“Excuse me,” she said after a few minutes. “I’ll be right back.”

She walked over to the minibar and poured herself a refill on the G&T. Raising it to her lips, she looked at Sean and banished Fretful Katie to the dungeon where she belonged.
You are twenty-eight years old, and you haven’t had sex in twenty-one months. This is not rocket science. This is car maintenance. This is a freaking oil change. Now shut up and do your damn job
.

Fretful Katie shut up.

“Sorry,” she said to Judah when she returned. She handed him a fresh drink. “Where were we?”

“I was telling you about my first dog. You were pretending to be interested.”

“I’m totally interested. I just needed to fortify myself for the serious stuff coming up.”

“You think there’s serious stuff?”

“I know there is. Serious stuff always comes after the dog.”

“My dog got hit by a car.”

“Sometimes it comes
during
the dog.”

Judah smiled and told her a story about how the dog had eaten his birthday cake when he
was ten and puked on the carpet in the middle of his party. Katie told him how her brother had crashed his car into their dad’s truck during
her
eleventh birthday party. They kept swapping stories, making each other laugh, polishing off their drinks and a couple of pizzas Judah had asked Ginny to order.

They talked until it had grown dark outside and the wind off Lake Erie began lashing the windows, rattling them in their panes and sending icy slivers of air through the cracks. Gradually, she took the conversation deeper, and Judah told her what it had been like growing up as a closeted gay kid in Family Values, Iowa. Knowing from a very early age that he didn’t fit, that he’d never fit, and not knowing what to do about it.

He told her about his first crushes, about the camp counselor who’d taught him how to kiss and how to give a hand job, the high school best friend who’d become his lover the summer after graduation.

He told her about the months he’d lived in Louisville and the show he’d played at the High Hat with Paul in the audience. How he’d moved out to L.A. and made it big within six months.

He told her a lot of things she was fairly sure he’d never told anyone. But he didn’t say a word about the messages.

Sean ate and typed out of earshot on the far side of the room, ignoring both of them except for the occasional obscure question for Judah:

“When did you last play a show in Minneapolis?”

“Are you a Beatles fan?”

“How long did you live in Louisville?”

He didn’t stutter when he asked the questions. He hadn’t stuttered since they’d entered the suite. Because of Judah? Because the work took his mind off his speech? She didn’t know.

Finally, around eight, Sean closed up the laptop and stood. “I’ll give this back to you tomorrow,” he said to Judah.

“No problem.”

“See you,” he announced to no one in particular before walking from the room without a backward glance.

Katie watched him go. Judah started singing “Man on the Run” under his breath.

“Maybe I shouldn’t sleep with him,” she said, not sure whether she was joking or serious.
“He’s kind of strange.”

“No, you should,” Judah said. “But you’re going to have to catch him first.”

Sean ran as fast as he could.

It wasn’t all that fast, given the snow pack on the shoulder of the road and the bitter wind, but he ran fast enough to make his lungs burn. He’d long since lost feeling in his toes, his cheeks, and the tip of his nose. A rime of frost covered the light gloves he wore—his own sweat, frozen as soon as it met the air—and he knew he was courting danger staying out here.

It was fucking cold, dark as pitch, and only a complete asshole would be outside running in the streets of Buffalo, New York, in early February at nine o’clock at night.

She drove him to new heights of idiocy.

He ran harder. Twenty more minutes, and he’d be wiped out enough to sleep.

Of all the outcomes he’d considered when he drove over to Katie’s house this morning, he hadn’t really thought she would come with him to Buffalo, and he’d certainly never imagined he would find himself in a situation where sex with her started to seem like a distinct possibility.

A possibility he had to make damn sure to avoid.

It was his own fault. He’d stepped way out of line—first at the club in Louisville, then at her house, and again in the truck. The problem was, where Katie was concerned, he had no self-control. None.

For a man who’d spent a decade practicing control like a religion, that was a bitter fucking pill to swallow.

Turning onto Delaware, he slowed to a walk. The lit facade of The Mansion beckoned from down the block. Sean tugged his hat down over his ears as a fresh runnel of sweat hit the back of his neck and chilled in two heartbeats.

Hot shower. Bed. A decent night’s sleep
. He’d wake up in the morning fortified against Katie and the threat she presented to his mental well-being. Tomorrow, he’d shoot her a quick email about the case and hole up in his room until he’d made some headway on Judah’s psycho.

If he just kept away from her, he wouldn’t have to think about the way she’d looked in the car, half-dressed with that red bra peeking out of her shirt. Eyes closed. Breasts arched toward him in invitation. Hands sliding restlessly over her thighs.

Everything about her saying
Touch me
. Every instinct he had screaming at him to oblige.

She’d just come out the other side of a divorce. She thought she wanted some fun, but he couldn’t be the one to give it to her. If he kissed her again, he would give her too much of himself, and then he would have to break it off, because the last thing he needed—the absolute last fucking thing—was another reason to remain in Camelot. It was impossible.

Any kind of physical relationship between him and Katie Clark had “bad idea” written all over it.

He passed through the parking lot and let himself in the side entrance, peeling the traction cleats off his running shoes and trying to knock most of the snow out of the coils before he came fully indoors. The Mansion hosted wedding receptions in its plush downstairs rooms. It was no place for a smelly, irritable guy to be dropping chunks of ice and snow.

On the way up the stairs, he pulled his jacket over his head, knocking off his hat in the process. The lightweight wool shirt he’d worn as a base layer was soaked with sweat, and he barely had the strength left in his legs for the second flight.

He definitely didn’t have the strength for the sight of Katie knocking on the door to his room with a bottle of wine tucked awkwardly under her arm and two mugs dangling from her free hand.

He’d just have to find some.

“What do you wuh-want?”

Focused on the door, she hadn’t heard him coming. When she turned, her free hand went to her throat. As he approached, her eyes raked over him, head to toe and all the way back up.

“Sweet Baby Jesus,” she said. “You were running? Outside? It’s, like, minus two hundred degrees out there.”

According to the outdoor thermometer, it was 3 degrees, not counting wind chill. The sight of Katie’s smooth, bare shoulders was nearly enough to make him break a sweat.

She wore her flannel pajama pants and the sleeveless top she’d had on in the car. What the hell was she doing with bare arms in the middle of the winter?

Sean brushed past, careful not to touch her, and opened the door to his room. “Go away, C-Clark.”

“Don’t be rude,” she said. “There’s a Jackie Chan marathon on, and I brought wine.”

“Chicks don’t like Jackie Chan.”

“I do. You want me to tell you all my favorite parts of
Rumble in the Bronx
to prove my credentials?”

“No. I wuh-want you to g-go away.” He walked into the room, leaving her in the doorway and hoping she’d take the hint and quit torturing him. The red bra straps weren’t peeking out from under her top anymore, which could only mean one thing.

No bra.

Sean dropped his jacket, hat, shoes, and cleats on the towel he’d left inside the open door to the bathroom. Katie walked in like she owned the place, setting the wine bottle and mugs down on the table by the TV.

“Hey, no fair. Your room is bigger than mine.” She peeked into the bathroom. “Your shower is bigger, too.”

When she looked back at him, he was staring at her, hoping she’d be intimidated by the glare he sent her way.

“What?” she asked.

“Are you ffflirting with me?”

“Maybe. Would that be really bad?”

“Yes.”

She stepped closer, giving him a view right down her shirt. She had small breasts. Soft swells on either side of her sternum. Shadows and valleys, a dozen places where his mouth would fit.

He closed his eyes.

He hated this. This weakness. The sound of his own voice, choking on feelings he didn’t want to have. The sound of him losing his grip.

“Okay,” she said. “Then I’m not flirting with you.”

He exhaled and searched for some kind of response. Some way to get Katie out of his room before he fucked up irrevocably.

“I’m n-not sssleeping with you.”

Smooth
.

She narrowed her eyes and parroted back the line he’d given her a week ago. “I didn’t ask you to.”

The challenge in her eyes was unmistakable, though. She would play it this way,
I just
stopped by braless in my jammies with a bottle of wine, as buddies do
, and anything that happened would be an accident. It would be his fault for not being able to keep his hands off her.

Damn it
, he wouldn’t play along.

“You d-did, c-coming over here d-d-dressed like that.”

She looked down at her flannel-clad legs. “It’s not like I’m wearing a French maid outfit.”

“You haven’t g-got a b-bra on.”

“I hardly have any boobs. What’s the big deal?”

“The b-b-big d-deal is I c-can ssee your arms and yuh-your …” Sean gestured at the expanse of her chest and her neck.

“My arms, Sean?” Her voice sliced at his composure. “You think I’m trying to seduce you because you can see my
arms
? Is your virtue that easy to compromise?”

“That’s n-not what I m-m-m—”

“You seem like a civilized guy. Can’t you control your animal impulses?”

Because he wanted so badly to grab her and kiss her until she shut up and glazed over and turned into an animal, too, he grabbed two fists of shirt at the back of his neck and pulled it over his head. Then he edged even closer, so he was breathing right up against her, his bare skin separated from hers by a millimeter of empty space charged with sweat and sex.

“C-can yuh-you?”

She didn’t say anything, but her eyes jumped around, flitting from his chest to his shoulders, his neck, his face. His cock grew heavy and began to ache.

“Want to watch a m-movie, ssweetheart?” he asked. “Want to ssit on the c-couch, getting drunk and not t-t-touching each other for a few hours?”