Asking for Trouble - Leslie Kelly [46]
Yeah. The fuck-me boots had been clue number one. He’d been imagining all kinds of things as he listened to the sharp heels click on the kitchen tile as she buzzed around playing housekeeper, trying to act like nothing was out of the ordinary as they ate. Somehow, the way she sashayed around in her skin-tight jeans—her sweet, curvy ass swaying with every step—didn’t make him feel very much like eating anything except her.
He told himself that wasn’t what had inspired him to shave this afternoon.
He suspected he was lying.
Because all day long he’d been mentally hearing her begging him, over and over, to taste her. A beautiful woman with the most amazing body he’d ever seen had begged him to suck her nipples and he’d walked away. No wonder he hadn’t been able to think of anything else all day but how badly he wanted to kiss every inch of her.
Dinner made it a lot more obvious. She was no longer sitting back and letting things happen spontaneously, like grateful kisses, or sultry encounters beneath stormy skies.
No.
The way she leaned over the table to refill his glass or pass the salt, causing her hot pink blouse to gap away from her chest, revealing plumped up, mouthwatering cleavage, cinched the certainty in his mind. He was being seduced. Lottie had stopped playing the earnest student slowly working her way into his life and gone right for his weak spot. His cock.
Not that it was weak. Hell, no. He’d had to keep his chair pulled closely in to the table throughout dinner just so she wouldn’t see the bulge in his lap.
Whatever her game, she’d definitely scored the first point. Because he was going to have a hard time getting up after dinner without her noticing her success.
So do it. Take her. Have done with it.
It was tempting. Especially now that, having spent a few days living under the same roof with her, he no longer had any doubts that he could trust the woman. She hadn’t tried to murder him in his bed…in fact, her biggest crime was that she was a pain in the ass about trying to take care of him.
Sweet. Nurturing. He wouldn’t have expected it of the brash young woman but he knew it was true. She came from a world very different from his own. And from the things she’d said about her family, he knew they had helped create the person she’d become. She was full of life and laughter and happiness.
Everything he was not.
God, he wanted her so much he thought about doing away with the pretenses, grabbing her arm and pulling her across the table onto his lap. Screw the dishes, screw the hour, he’d do her on the kitchen floor, he was that desperate.
Funny, it wasn’t his own self-disgust that stopped him from doing it. It was the realization that he owed her more. She deserved to know whom she was having sex with. Especially after she’d so vehemently defended him against the foolish, gossipy old cleaning lady this afternoon.
What, he wondered, would she say if he told her the woman was right? That he was a killer?
Not a murderer. No. But a killer nonetheless.
He might have been trying to save his own life by fighting back after he’d been sliced in the face and shot in the chest by a couple of scumbags bent on robbery.
But he’d ended that night alive. And the woman had ended it dead.
He was a killer. No matter what Lottie Santori thought.
“I need to get back to work,” he said, pushing back from the table before finishing the last of his dinner, which she’d once again skillfully prepared.
“What?” She blinked, eyeing him with disbelief. “Good grief, Simon, it’s seven o’clock. You’ve worked all day. Can’t you even enjoy a decent meal?”
“Thank you,” he muttered, meaning it. “You didn’t have to go to all this