“Why would I do that?” he asked quietly. “I don’t want to see you hurt. Those letters are serious, Janey.
Someone wants to hurt you.”
“Someone wants to hurt my feelings and run me out of town,” she argued, fighting to keep her tone placid. “You’re the one that ran to Natches and the others like a damned spy.”
“So I’m the one being punished?” He stroked her arm as he released her, running the backs of his fingers down it, and nothing more.
He stepped back. As though he remembered he shouldn’t touch her.
“Yeah. Something like that.” She moved away from him.
She made it as far as the couch.
“How long did they give you for the food?” he asked.
“Forty minutes.” She shrugged, sliding back into her seat and reaching for her wine.
“Enough time.”
Her head jerked up at the sound of his voice. He was stalking toward the couch. He’d shed his jacket; the dark T-shirt stretched across powerful shoulders and biceps. His jeans were snug, clearly revealing the erection she had refused to check for earlier.
“For what?” Her voice was weak, breathless.
She was a fool. She should put her foot down right now, let him know she wasn’t going to be a toy for him any more than she would be for anyone else.
But then he knelt in front of her. Slowly, his hands cupped over her knees and drew her thighs apart, wide enough for him to slide between them.
“Don’t do this.” Her hands moved to his shoulders, but she wasn’t pushing him away.
What he did to her should be illegal. He made her weak, made her unwilling to fight.
“I don’t think I can help it, Janey.” He slid his hands up her thighs, the heat of his palms burning her through the cotton pants she wore. “I didn’t sleep worth shit last night.”
That made two of them. But this wasn’t going to help either of them sleep at night, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to help her keep her heart shielded against him.
“You were too busy plotting to sleep,” she accused him. “You didn’t have to tell Natches about those letters.”
“Yeah, I did.” His gray eyes were darker, his lashes surrounding them like a heavy shadow. “I won’t let you be hurt.”
Janey pressed back into the couch cushions behind her. She could smell him, and she needed to escape the dark, heated scent.
“Take your shirt off for me, Janey,” he whispered. “Let me see you. Just a little bit.”
Her ni**les peaked harder than they were before.
She licked her lips, her breathing becoming rougher, harder, as his gaze latched on to that action.
“I dare you,” he challenged her. “Come on, Janey. Tease me. I give you permission.”
“Tease you?” she repeated. “I have a feeling it would be like a lamb teasing a wolf, Alex. We’ve already established the fact that you can make me respond.”
“Make you respond?” His thumbs rotated inside her thighs. “Do I force you to respond, Janey?”
“Don’t play word games with me,” she protested, hating this response to him, hating herself for being so weak.
His lips quirked. She loved his lips when he did that. The wide, sensually full shape of them made her hungry to taste them. Made her desperate to feel them.
“Can I take your T-shirt off, then?” He leaned closer, his lips touching her jaw as Janey felt her lashes flutter at the warmth of the caress. “I’d do it slow and easy. Give you time to protest. I’d unwrap you like the prettiest present.”
She felt his fingers move beneath the hem of her shirt, lift it. She shook, felt herself trembling as the material cleared her stomach, then eased over her br**sts.
Memories, stark and brutal, clashed with the need rising, sharp and hot, inside her.
“You’re so pretty, Janey.” His voice was like a sigh, breaking through the fear that would have risen inside her. “I’ve wanted to tell you for years how pretty you were, and I knew better. I knew I had no business wanting you, thinking about you.”
Her arms lifted as he drew the shirt over her head and dropped it to the couch beside her.
She was breathing hard and fast now, her br**sts rising and falling, framed by the white lace of the demi bra she wore. Her ni**les were hard, sensitive, pressing into the thin cups as he stared at her, his expression tight, his lips parted as his own breathing roughened.
“It should be a sin for a woman as pretty as you to be a virgin,” he told her. “You should have been loved slow and easy. Taken all night long. Licked from the sweet curves of your lips to the tips of your
toes.”
She was enthralled. His hands pressed against her sides, moved up until they paused just beneath the swollen curves of her br**sts.
Janey watched him carefully. Her br**sts were tender, sensitive. They had been ever since Nadine had bruised them. The bruising had been deep, but the mental scars had gone deeper.
“I know what she did,” he whispered, as though reading her mind.
Janey cringed at Alex’s words and tried to push him away from her.
“No, Janey,” he whispered. “No secrets between us. Not like this. I won’t hurt you.”
“Yes, you will,” she protested, her voice hoarse. She couldn’t seem to maintain that veil of cool disinterest with Alex as she did with everyone else. “You won’t be able to help it.”
He lifted his eyes from her br**sts to her face. “Do you think I’m that rough?” he asked her.
“You could probably make me beg you for any touch you wanted to give me,” she admitted. “But I can’t handle you, Alex. Not right now. Not like this.”
He grimaced. “No games, Janey. I promise. I’m too old for games. We agree to just this, and no one gets hurt.”
Just this? Just sex?
She watched him, miserably aware that she wanted him with a strength that was going to destroy her.
She knew it would. She could feel it coming.
When his lips touched hers, there was no fight left in her. Except the fight to see how much deeper she could make him kiss her. Her lips parted beneath his, a moan slipping past her throat as her nails dug into the material covering his shoulders.
Tongues dueled. Licked. Tasted. One hand moved from beneath her br**sts to cup her neck. His hand was so large that his palm and fingers curled from the side of her neck all the way around the back of it.