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Those were Luke’s first thoughts when she tiptoed out of the hotel bathroom in a blue terry cloth robe, nearly tripping on the hem of the voluminous thick folds that swallowed her.
“I’m sorry. Do you need to go—” She blushed slyly at this mention of bathroom activities, and scooted against the wall. She ran her fingers through golden, damp curls. “How long was I?”
Not that she looked like she cared in the least.
“An hour. More than an hour,” he grumbled, not because he was angry, but because he’d been too aware of her in there and she was too damn pretty with all that honey-gold, flyaway hair cascading in rippling spirals all over her slim shoulders.
“Sorry,” she whispered without the least bit of sincerity. Fingertips fluttered quickly to her lips.
She didn’t look like a whore anymore. Then she stared at him suspiciously, and he almost wished she did. He had the strangest feeling he didn’t have her figured at all. But that was absurd.
She was tall, five eight if she was an inch. Yet she seemed smaller. She was too thin for his usual taste, but her delicately boned frame and her natural grace made her easy on his eye. And those soft, ample breasts and long, shapely legs made him forget how skinny she was in other places. Not that he could see much of her lush curves with so much blue terry cloth swaddling them, hem puddling at the slim ankles, thick, long sleeves dangling over her nervous fingertips.
Without her makeup, with her cheeks flushed from the long bath, without the tight polka-dot dress to cheapen her beauty, she looked sweet and young—as delectably innocent as a high school virgin, as classy as the priciest cover model, but a bit bratty, too.
The deep blue intensified the brilliant color of her eyes. It was those eyes, the way they sparkled with such mischief, that made her look…What? Sort of spontaneous and unpredictable.
She was so alive, incandescent, mesmerizing, sexier than hell. She drew him. Indeed, she had some gut-clenching power over him no woman had ever had. Or maybe, it was just that he felt so damned lonely and vulnerable after Marcie.
The girl’s golden hair shone, and he wanted to slide his fingers through its lustrous thickness. Who was he kidding? He wanted to do way more than that. Sex appeal—she had it in spades. At least for him. Which put him on dangerous ground.
With looks like hers, she could make a fortune. She was wasting herself on the border.
Maybe he should hire this lively girl on a permanent basis—to service him. Him alone. He wouldn’t share.
He could hire somebody to teach her how to talk and act at his parties. In the right clothes, she’d prance about palaces like a thoroughbred. Just like he did. Nobody would ever know they were a pair of fakes from the gutter.
She’d be more suited to him than the highbred socialites he dated. She knew what women were really for. He wouldn’t let her near those self-help books and women’s magazines that had made Marcie so dissatisfied. No expensive shrink like Marcie’s for this girl.
This girl turned him on. He needed a simple, basic relationship with a woman. Sex. A woman like her wouldn’t demand what he wasn’t capable of giving.
“Long bath,” he said, attempting to consider her as coldly as he would any commodity he was interested in buying.
But she wouldn’t have it. She glared back at him with an impish ferocity that stunned him.
No. Don’t even think about it. This girl spelled trouble. Besides, a woman of any sort was the last thing he needed as a permanent fixture. Especially when he was still so raw from Marcie…
“I always take long baths,” the girl retorted. “Not that my habits are any of your business, mind you.” She softened this bit of rudeness with the most enchanting blush; she squirmed, too, toes curling into the carpet. Sensing danger, but not about to run from him, her long-lashed, blue eyes flashed. Her mixture of boldness, reticence and obvious discomfiture around him caused a tightness in his chest.
He remembered their fight. Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t totally unreasonable of her to distrust him. He’d forced her to walk and drink coffee until she’d collapsed in angry tears and called him a bully. When her mind had cleared, she’d thrown everything he’d told her about Mexico right back at him.
“Why, you raped—”
“I saved your cute little ass,” he’d thundered. “You were tied to bedposts…half-naked…alone…like some damsel in distress in a porn comic book.”
“And what do men in those comic books do to such women?”
“The point is I got you out of Mexico.”
“You’re determined to paint yourself as a hero and me as a—” She’d blushed then. “You don’t know anything.”
He’d learned quickly she blushed at nearly everything. Then she’d looked stricken and profoundly ashamed. Naturally, she’d launched an attack. “You almost raped me—”
“Almost being the operative word. You teased me, kissed me. You wouldn’t even know about it if I hadn’t told you.”
“Ha! I’m surprised you did,” she’d huffed. “I’m sure the only reason you did was to put me down. You just love telling me how low and awful you think I am. You called me a—”
Whore? He’d restrained himself and hadn’t said the word out loud again. “Your career of choice was all too obvious.”
She’d blushed again, bitten her lips. “Ha! And are you always right about everything?”
He’d laughed. “Don’t act so coy. You came on to me like a pro. You put your hands on me, remember? You unzipped me, fondled me, begged me for it.”
“Because I—” She went stock-still. Her blush was no longer becoming. Her face had deepened to angry purple.
Were those tears glistening behind her eyelids, too? Tears of outrage? She had a misplaced temper, this girl.
“If I did those things…” Her lip quivered. “Not that I’m at all sure I should believe you…I—I must have thought you were somebody else…somebody decent…although how I could have thought such a thing about you—even drugged—I’m sure I can’t imagine.”
The indignation and despair in her soft voice jarred him. Still, he defended himself with a burst of temper equal to hers.
“That same decent somebody who drugged you and tied you to those bedposts and left you there for anybody to find?” he shouted. He never shouted. Not at underlings. “Lucky for you I came along and not somebody else.”
“Lucky? You’re judging me…when you don’t know anything about me. You said yourself you nearly raped me.…”
“Don’t be inane,” he said in a low, controlled voice. “I stopped when you said no.”
“Then why did you feel guilty enough to confess?” Her voice was equally controlled. But she stuck her pretty little nose in the air and faced him with a startling amount of belligerent spirit. “You say I fainted. You say you’re my hero. How do I know what you really did?”
“I stopped.” He ground his words like meat through a grinder.
“You don’t look like a man who would stop once he got started.”
Her perverse compliment maddened him. The gall of this girl!
“I got you the hell out of Mexico. It cost me five hundred dollars cash to bribe the border guard.”
“You bribed a border guard?” Her eyes widened. “I wish they’d thrown you in jail. I would have liked seeing you behind bars—caged.”
“Well, they didn’t, because like everybody else in this world, especially you, they’re for sale, sweetheart.”
“You must have a limited and unlikable bunch of acquaintances.”
“Carrying unconscious young females across international borders is a highly suspicious activity. I had to pay them. They were strangers, not acquaintances.”
“I don’t much like you—even if you are as handsome as Mr. Darcy.”
Handsome? She thought him handsome. “Who the hell is Mr. Darcy? A client?”
“Do you read? Never mind. An almost rape?” She eyed him skeptically. “Bribing a government official? You are a man who’s capable of highly suspicious activities.”
“Then we’re a matched pair.”
“No, we aren’t.”
Huffiness. Morality. From the likes of her?
“I found you tied to bedposts,” he thundered.
“You keep saying that! If that’s so, you’ve made the most of it ever since!”
“You were drugged.”
She glared at him. “I don’t take drugs and I don’t like being insulted.”
“Do you like being alive and in one piece on this side of the border?”
“I do,” she admitted. “Thank you. But I don’t much like sharing a…a cage with a beast like you.”
“I’m not a beast.”
Her lack of gratitude, her refusal to admit her own shortcomings, her ability to see the worst in him—everything about her maddened him. But what really set him on edge was her standing there in the bathroom doorway in that robe, looking sexy as hell as she stared daggers through him.
“Come out for God’s sakes. I won’t bite.”
Shyly, she took a trembling step. “I have to go home.”
“Not till I’m sure you’re okay…safe.”
“You don’t care about my safety,” she said in that soft, knowing tone. “I know why you won’t let me go. What sort of games do you play, Mr. McKade, with your women?”
His pulse accelerated. “I worked my ass off to sober you up. I fed you supper…breakfast.…”
“You made me eat eggs. I don’t like eggs.”
“How was I supposed to know that?”
“I told you.”
“For God’s sakes, I’m not running a short-order grill. I ordered eggs. I ate them myself.”
“But you like eggs.”
“You have the most illogical mind.”
“Don’t say that.”
As if she were remembering the other battles they’d fought, she stared past him, to the closet, to the skeleton key in the closet door. “You deliberately scared me.”
“Relax. Forget that,” he growled, ashamed of that little episode.
“You threatened to lock me in there.”
“You ran out.”
“Because you’re a big bully.”
“Only sometimes…when pushed.”
“All the time, I bet.”
“I couldn’t let you run off drugged—”
“Quit saying I was drugged.”
“When you quit calling me a bully.” His heart darkened with a bitter memory. There was ice and yet pain, too, in his deep voice. “Where I come from…it was bully…or be bullied.” Why had he said that? Why had he betrayed himself to the likes of her?
She lifted her chin, studied him. “I bet you were the biggest, baddest bully of all.”
He glared. She chewed on her bottom lip, considering him with one of those intense glances that unsettled him and made him wonder what she might do next.
They were in Little Red’s hotel suite. The room key had been in his brother’s wallet. Luke had brought her here on the thin chance his brother would show up…alive…and he could, thus, kill two birds with one stone.
His brother’s suite had seemed as good a place as any to sober her up. Once, after pouring countless cup-fuls of coffee down her, when he’d been forcing her to pace the room with him, she’d panicked and broken out of the suite. He’d caught her in the hall, shoved her back inside, and pushed her into the closet. She’d pounded wildly on the door. He’d opened it and told her to be quiet, threatening to tie her up the way Baines had or gag her and lock her in the closet if she didn’t behave.
She stared at the skeleton key in the lock of the closet door and went still.
“My aunt used to lock me up…in the dark,” she said. “And tonight…” Her eyes filled with terror.
“Difficult aunt.”
“Oh, she was. She was a lot like you. She believed all people were for sale, too, especially women. She even saw marriage in that light. She was always saying, ‘It’s just as easy to marry a rich man as a poor man.”’
“Every woman I know thinks like that.”
“Not me. I believe in love, in chemistry, in magic—in excitement.” She snapped her fingers. “Or I used to. Till Brand.” Her voice dropped. “Till you.” Again her eyes held fear although she strove to talk about something else. “My aunt and I drove each other to distraction. But she taught me to read and to appreciate the fine arts. On the whole, she was a lot nicer than you.” She tried to smile. “And at least she was very well educated and way more honest about what she was up to than you are—McKade.”
“Call me Luke.”
“I’m not sure yet if I want to know you that well.”
“You’re rude.”
“Me, rude? That’s rich.”
“Ungrateful too,” he accused.
She seemed to make an effort to concentrate on what he was saying instead of on what she was so afraid of.
