Asking for Trouble - Leslie Kelly [17]
Big mistake. Stick a giant wooden stick between my legs and you’d have a human Popsicle.
“You asked for this,” I muttered, trying to distract myself from the shivery twitches of my legs and arms. Not to mention the sight of my own breaths puffing out into the air.
I’d asked for it, and I’d gotten it. I’d been so happy he’d agreed I could stay that I hadn’t voiced a single protest when he’d led me up to the shadowy third floor. I’d barely had time to glance at the old paintings gracing the walls—beautiful but disturbing images of this very house and the ragged cliffs surrounding three sides of it.
He’d lit the way with one of his lanterns. Using an ancient-looking iron key, he’d open the door to a room that smelled of must and old age. Without so much as a good-night, Mr. Lebeaux had set the lantern on the dresser, spun around and stalked out of the room, obviously familiar enough with the house to maneuver his way back in the darkness.
Mr. Lebeaux. God, I didn’t even know his first name. But I didn’t care. Deep down part of me prayed he’d get lost in the darkness and accidentally wander back in here during the night, mistaking my room for his. That he’d crawl in bed beside me like a fly landing in a web.
That would make me the spider.
But I didn’t care. I was feeling predatory, unable to shut down the heated images in my mind. Frankly, three years and no sex would probably have made me react to a balding, middle-aged circus clown. With a hot and dangerous, strikingly handsome man like Lebeaux, it was almost more than I could stand.
Despite the cold, my body wanted to kick off the weight of the covers. To writhe around on the bed, twisting my legs, spreading them—anything to ease the ache of want that had become so familiar it was almost part of me now. Though my hair and body had dried, I was still wet, between my thighs, wanting sex. Wanting it badly. Which was why I’d worn a thoroughly inappropriate-for-the-weather slinky nightgown, just on the off chance the man was coming back.
“He’s not coming back,” I whispered, tempted to get up and put on my sweats and socks. And my coat.
But even the cold couldn’t keep my mind off warm, intimate thoughts for too long. Not now that a gruff-talking, black-eyed stranger had brought every sexual urge I possessed out of hiding and started them all doing a kick line deep inside my body.
Somehow, though, I knew it wasn’t just desperate sexual hunger keeping me awake. I couldn’t stop thinking of my host’s dark haunted eyes. He’d been gruff—abrasive, yes—but he was practically wrapped in an aura of wounded sadness, lashing out at the world but only hurting himself.
I knew, deep inside, that he needed warm, gentle hands to heal him. Just as I knew I needed hot, strong hands to heal me.
We were exactly what each other needed. Exactly.
“Oh, God,” I whispered, staring up toward the ceiling, lit by a bit of watery moonlight that had finally emerged now that the worst of the storm had passed. “I can’t leave here tomorrow.”
If I had known where my host’s bedroom was, I might have risked pulling some kind of female trick. Racing to him in a sexy nightgown to tell him I saw a mouse or something. Lame, I know. But desperate times called for desperate measures.
Unfortunately, I didn’t know where the man was. And in this huge house which, he informed me as he led me upstairs, had forty-two guest rooms, I wasn’t likely to stumble over him.
Suddenly hearing a creaking sound in the hallway, I sucked in a breath, convinced he was about to knock on my door and ask me if I wanted him to keep me warm with his big, hot body. I thought the sound—footsteps—paused in front of my doorway, and held my breath for the longest time.
The door never opened. The footsteps never moved away. And I figured