Intimate Seduction - Brenda Jackson [36]
But she did.
And that area between her legs was tingling to find out.
She glanced over at the illuminated clock on the nightstand. It was two in the morning.
Releasing a frustrated sigh, she pushed the covers aside and eased out of bed. She had brought her laptop with her to work on a few items for NASA while she was here. Last year she had received a national award for her work on stratospheric chemistry and ozone depletion. Her report had been embraced by the NASA Ames Research Center which had led to her working closely with the center last summer. Her findings had been put in a book that was doing quite well on the academic circuit. Now she was working again with NASA on a project to increase the rate of nitrous oxide in the atmosphere.
These studies had been her lifeline. When most people curled up at night with a good mystery novel, she much preferred curling up with her laptop to work on chemistry formulas. Very seldom did anything else consume her mind while working—definitely not the likes of any man. But Donovan Steele had somehow managed to seep inside the very essence of her brain that had always been off-limits. He had managed to invade a space that had always been kept reserved for all her subscripts. Somehow she needed to get back in sync.
Her aunt needed her so she didn’t have the option to leave Charlotte. And she couldn’t have her aunt drop him as a client because he headed the dependable list. He paid his bill on time and had few, if any, complaints or last-minute changes in the schedule that could cause the agency loss of revenue or manpower. In other words, he was a model client, one you didn’t drop just because he intended to sleep with the cleaning lady’s niece.
Of course, as far as she was concerned, it was wishful thinking on his part. But still, those dreams wouldn’t go away. And to make matters worse, her conversation with Farrah last night still weighed heavily on her mind. It constantly reminded her that it had been years since she’d been intimate with someone and all because of one man.
At least Donovan had proven that Karl’s kissing claim was wrong. Could he prove the other claims were wrong, as well? Was she as terrible in the bedroom as Karl had accused her of being?
As she sat down at the desk in the room and booted up her laptop, she couldn’t help but inwardly call herself a fool for letting Karl mess with her confidence years ago.
Logging in to her Internet account, she went into the project folder that stored vital information when she wasn’t on-site at the campus lab. And just in case someone tried hacking into her computer base, she had all the information coded in a way that only she could decipher. Usually when she worked on formulas she felt she was in her element. But tonight she knew deep down she was using her work as an escape.
In fact if she was completely honest with herself she would admit to having used it as a way of escaping for a very long time. At that moment she couldn’t help but think about the vast differences between Karl and Donovan. Karl had been too brilliant for his own good and assumed because of his high IQ that everyone else was lacking. It had taken her years to realize that he hadn’t been comfortable with his own skin, which was probably why he took great pride in downgrading others.
The complete opposite was true with Donovan. He was arrogant but he was also comfortable in his own skin. It was obvious that he was a man comfortable with who he was and what he represented. Manly, in and out.
Sensations flowed through her stomach when she thought about just how manly he was. That was what had her in a bad way. She had five days to get herself together. On Friday she would return to his home, and she wanted to make sure that she was in and out of there before he got in from work. She had six more weeks to go, and she intended to avoid the man at all costs.
“You’re pregnant?” Donovan