Flirting With Disaster (7 page)

Instinct took over. He angled his head and brought her closer with the flat of his hand on her back so he could kiss her harder and deeper.

This was what he’d wanted to tell her earlier in the room.
This
.

Her energy moved into him where they touched, thighs and mouths and his palm on her bare skin, the other wrapped around the nape of her neck. The pleasure of smelling her, touching her, unhitched something essential he kept reined in, and he felt the sudden rush of it, the terrible freedom of losing control—

And that made him stop.

What the fuck was he doing? Kissing Katie in public, in front of Judah? He was out of his mind.

When he pulled away, she made a sound, a sort of helpless squeak that said she wanted to
continue, and hearing it called up a desperate ache in his chest that he immediately locked down.

Appalling, what she did to him. He wanted her. Right here, right now, with that black dress bunched up around her thighs. He wanted her anywhere, everywhere, any way he could get her.

All these weeks that he’d been attracted to Katie and done nothing about it, he’d never counted on
this
—this appalling need. He’d kissed her, angry and possessive, and her response had unhinged him somehow. Probably he deserved it—an ironic punishment that he would appreciate if it weren’t so fucking dangerous. He was kissing her in a
hallway
, for Christ’s sake. In front of a
client
.

And worst of all, even now, after his sense had returned, it would take nothing more than one push from her, one smile, one crook of her finger, and he’d do it all over again.

He took a step back, trying to project an ease he didn’t feel. Whatever it was that Katie did to him, he couldn’t afford it. He had to finish this job for Caleb, and then he needed to get back to California and focus on his own company.

Best to keep his attention where it belonged.

“If you want to talk to her, I’ve got no problem with it,” he said to Judah. It pleased him to hear his voice come out the way it was supposed to, smooth and even and unaffected. He was being an enormous asshole—more of an asshole than he could ever recall being before, which was saying something—but at least he was an asshole who could talk. “Just don’t keep her up too late.”

He shot a look at Katie. Her chest rose and fell rapidly. Her eyes were absolutely furious. With good reason, since he’d just publicly staked her like an unclaimed piece of property, then passed her along to another man.

I’m not usually like this
, he wanted to tell her.
I just need to get far, far away from you
.

“See you in the room, sweetheart,” he said.

Sean returned to his post at the bar, leaving Katie and Judah to work out their own arrangements.

Katie kept reviewing her situation, but it came out the same every time: she was in the penthouse suite of a swanky hotel, on a couch with the sexiest man alive.

Officially the sexiest, according to
People
magazine. The issue featuring Judah decorated her bedside table at home. He lounged on the cover in a white linen suit, looking thoroughly edible.

But that was in Camelot. She was in Kentucky, and in Kentucky, in this suite, Judah Pratt was shirtless and disheveled, and he had one hand on her bare thigh. Their game of sexual one-upmanship had been drawing them closer together ever since she walked through his door, and now she had her legs across his lap, and she couldn’t stop staring at his hand. The sexiest hand alive. On her thigh.

He had excellent fingernails, square and neat. Only a manicure gave you fingernails that nice. Did men get manicures?

She thought maybe rich men did.

Yes, she was a little tipsy. Judah had some kind of superstition that dictated shots had to be downed in multiples of three, so she’d done two to his four in order to make six, and then when she’d wanted another one he’d had to do two more—all over a rather short period of time, since his superstition also forbade setting the glass down once he’d poured it.

The magazines loved to play up that side of Judah’s personality—the way he never stepped on cracks, left rooms through the same door he’d entered, tossed salt over his shoulder to ward off evil. She’d wondered if it was a role he put on for the press, but apparently not.

Unless he’d put it on for her, too, in the interest of getting her drunk. But if that was the case, she was happy to play along.

Tequila turned out to be just the thing to tip a girl in the direction of “torrid and inadvisable.” With every shot she and Judah knocked back, they’d teased each other a little more dangerously, until they were swapping innuendo so outrageously that the sexual possibility she’d been chasing since she met him in Chicago had become a sordid inevitability.

Bring it on
. Under her dress, she wore the sexiest piece of lingerie she’d ever owned. Hot
pink, satiny, and scandalously skimpy, it caressed her every time she shifted on the couch. Her underwear was turning her on. That was good, right?

It had to be good. Because Judah Pratt, Sexiest Man Alive, was going to kiss her any second. And when he did, she was going to start to want him.

“Katie?” he asked in that velvety voice, the same deep rumble she’d gone shivery for a hundred times.

“Yeah?”

“You and Sean …”

“Are coworkers.”

Sean wasn’t allowed in this room. He wasn’t allowed in her head, either. She would not think about what he’d done at the club tonight. The unexpected sensation of his huge, warm hand moving up her naked back. The goose bumps. That kiss. That kiss like someone had taken all her blood and replaced it with lava without her permission.

It had been such a dick move, that kiss. A power play to keep her away from Judah. Sean had probably agreed to it as a favor to Caleb. She could just imagine them on the phone.

Help me out and keep her away from that guy, will you?

Sure, man. Whatever you say
.

Infantile boy-men and their territory-claiming games. She didn’t answer to Sean, or to Caleb, either. She couldn’t be branded with a kiss like a steer or claimed with one word whispered in her ear by a man who otherwise refused to talk to her.

When they got back to the room after the concert, she’d taken a card from Parisian Katie’s deck and paid him back. She’d placed her high-heel-clad foot on a chair, bent over right in front of him, and unbuckled and refastened the strap, making sure she was showing off the maximum amount of everything without actually flashing him.

Take that, Sean Owens
.

She wouldn’t think about his expression afterward. The tension in his jaw. The way his fingers had bit into the edge of the mattress, white-knuckled.

“Just coworkers?” Judah asked.

“Just coworkers.”

“Because I try not to poach.”

“I’m not a pheasant,” she said, rather more vehemently than she’d intended. “Sean hasn’t
bagged
me.”

“If you say so, sexy.”

He really needed to stop calling her “sexy,” because they were not on television, and it was not 1978, and he did not have a mustache and a giant pelt of curly chest hair.

Or maybe she just needed to lighten up. It was harder than she’d expected to get into the spirit of things. It might have been different if she were still nineteen—if she’d never spent days at a time carrying her clothes on her back and peeing in the woods—but she’d lived the last decade in the real world, and it turned out her celebrity crush wasn’t translating as seamlessly into reality as she’d hoped.

Not that Judah wasn’t gorgeous, because he was. He was extraordinarily good-looking. But he wasn’t quite as big as she’d expected him to be, or as
much
. She’d thought he’d keep on being larger than life, but the more time she spent with him, the more he shrunk down, and now he was precisely life-sized. When he made heavy-lidded, smoldering eyes at her—the same smolder she’d loved on the cover of
People
—he looked more like a man who’d had three too many shots of tequila than one who wanted to jump her bones.

But still. Here she was. He was attractive, she was willing, sex was sex. She’d really liked sex once, and she had every intention of liking sex with Judah.

He lowered his head and nuzzled the exact same spot on her neck that Sean had rasped his face over earlier.

Nothing happened to her body in response.
Nothing
.

Katie decided to cut to the chase. She grabbed his head and tilted it up to lock her mouth over his.

He made a noise, satisfied and male, and kissed her back. His lips tasted like tequila and lime, which was excellent. She threaded her fingers into his hair.

He had such great hair. He’d showered before she came up here, and when he answered the door his hair had still been shiny-damp, gleaming under the track lights.

Come to think of it, wasn’t it still gleaming? It felt kind of stiff under her fingers, like he’d put something in it. Gel? Or one of those pomades her stylist was always trying to sell her?

Whatever it was, his hair looked fantastic, and it smelled good, too. Like hot sun and beach and … rosemary? Anise? She nibbled his lip and took a deep breath, wanting one more shot at classifying precisely what sort of delicious he was, and her nose wrinkled up.

Shit
. She was going to—

She sneezed. Thank God, she got her hand up in time, but still, right in his face. How embarrassing.

“Sorry,” she said. “Can we try that again?”

Judah smiled, and she smiled right back at him. She couldn’t help it. He was so damned good-looking when he smiled. Smooth skin, amazing cheekbones, perfect lips … So what if his kiss didn’t set her loins aflame? So what? It was a totally adequate kiss. Totally adequate kisses led to totally adequate sex, which would be totally adequate to her purposes.

He kissed her again, and this time she opened her mouth to receive his tongue, ready for it to be wonderful.

His tongue was wet.

Everybody’s tongue was wet, though, right? And it had been a long time since she’d kissed somebody with tongue. A very long time. Maybe she’d forgotten how messy French kissing was. Once they got under way, she’d be more into it, and she wouldn’t notice the saliva-swapping aspect of this encounter quite so much.

Judah leaned into the kiss, pressing her into the couch. His nose pushed up against her nose, and she couldn’t figure out how she was supposed to carry on breathing and kissing him at the same time. She tried moving her head to one side, but he followed her, and then she tried the other side and that worked.

Right. Good
. Now she could concentrate.

Katie closed her eyes and focused on the sensation of his hand stroking down her arm, closing over her breast.

And kneading.

She’d never been able to see the point of the kneading. Her breast was not a lump of dough. Having it mashed around did nothing for her.

She arched her back, hoping to encourage a little nipple play, but Judah didn’t take the hint. He just gave her more kneading, which, in combination with the thrusts of his overlarge, overwet tongue into her mouth and the fact that he’d pushed his nose against hers again, sort of made her want to smack him.

In fairness, it probably wasn’t his fault. Her sex life had become a sad, solitary thing, utterly reliant on her right hand and whatever hot moment she’d plucked out of the week’s erotic
novel or soft-focus TV sex scene. What if she’d reconditioned herself to respond only to fictional sex?

It was a disturbing possibility, and one she had to consider, because here she was with the Sexiest Cock Alive in range, and she wasn’t feeling any zing.

Her junk was broken.

Unless it just needed a kick start?

She rifled through her mental files, trying to come up with some reliable wank material. That scene where the ex-con lumberjack nailed the meek librarian in the stacks? Or the one where the bad-boy Kiwi did dirty things to his sweet, innocent best friend?

Her brain gave her Sean’s hard face and soft mouth. His big hands. The disturbing look in his eyes right before he kissed her. The look that said,
You belong to me, and I’m going to have you
.

She moaned, lifting her hips against Judah’s thigh.

Wrong thigh
, whispered her brain.

Shut up
, she whispered back.

She shifted, trying to center Judah between her legs and find something worth pushing against, but either he had a dick so small she couldn’t find it or he wasn’t hard yet.

Katie saw the future then, and it wasn’t pretty. It was endless minutes of ineffectual foreplay, a precarious erection that had to be petted and coaxed into joining the party, a bottle of lube located and put to good use …

This was precisely why she’d come close to giving up on sex altogether in the last year of her marriage. Because it wasn’t fun. It was
work
.

Judah’s mouth moved to the tops of her breasts as his hand pushed her dress up higher. She looked down and saw her fancy panties exposed, his leg thrown over hers, his fingernails dimpling the skin of her thigh.

She couldn’t. She just couldn’t.

Sitting up as far as she could, she scooted back a few inches and pulled down her dress.

“Sorry. I’m not—I don’t think this is … Can we take five?”

When he looked up from her breasts, unfocused in a way that shouted
tequila
rather than
lust
, she smiled as bravely as she could manage.

“Take five?” he asked.

“Like a time-out?”

That sobered him up. “This isn’t a basketball game, sexy. Either you’re going to let me fuck you or you’re not.”

When he put it that way, she didn’t have any trouble making herself more explicit. “I’m not.”

His hands were braced on either side of her, pressing his weight into the couch. Crowding her. Judah wasn’t huge, but he was certainly bigger than her, with muscular arms that made her nervous, suddenly.

Alone with a drunk man in his penthouse suite. A horny drunk man. Oh, genius, Katie. Really genius
.