Beneath the Secrets: Part One(21)

“You heard me. I’m not a toy for you and your crew to pass around. I don’t care what Mendez told you. I’m not. Let me get dressed and either treat me with respect and let me help you do your job or I’m leaving.”

“Wait.” He shook his head, looking truly baffled. “You think I have people coming here and I plan to let them use you however they please?” He glanced at the phone and back at her. “How did me ordering pizza turn into this?”

“Don’t play naive. It doesn’t suit you.”

“Sweetheart, I wasn’t even naive the day my mama popped me out and the doc slapped my ass. But apparently I do need the just-born-yesterday version of where this assumption came from because not only is no one else coming over. I’m not big on sharing.”

Kara drew back to study him closer, taking in the strong lines of his masculine face, the openness of his normally shielded dark eyes. He really seemed sincere in his claim. “But you ordered four pizzas.”

“Well, yeah. Of course I did. There are two of us.”

“I won’t eat two pizzas.”

“One for you and two for me. Then an extra for breakfast.”

Her brows dipped. “You can eat that much pizza?”

“I like pizza.” Amusement danced in his dark eyes. “So…you assumed I was bringing in ‘the crew’ because of the pizza I ordered?”

She blinked. “Well, I—”

“Overreacted,” he finished, pulling her close, his strong arms wrapping around her and his long dark hair tickling her cheek, and her senses right along with it.

“If you’re telling the truth,” Kara bargained, trying to ignore the slow spread of heat through her limbs, “prove it and let me get dressed.”

“I like you better naked.”

She ground her teeth and tried to push away from him. He held her easily. “No one is coming but you aren’t getting dress. You drugged me, Kara. I’m not giving you a chance to do it again.”

“I can’t be naked every time we’re together, Blake.”

“Every time we’re alone suits me just fine.”

She ignored the erotically charged reply that only made her more aware of his broad, well-muscled, bare chest. “How are we going to work together if you don’t trust me?”

“And you trust me?” he challenged.

“No, I don’t trust you. Why would I?”

“Exactly. No one trusts each other in this world.” He surprised her, sliding his hand under her hair and pulling her mouth to his. She surprised herself by not even trying to shove away. The feel of his hard body next to hers, his powerful arms holding her, was just too overwhelmingly right, even when it should be wrong.

His lips brushed hers, tongue teasing hers in a feather-light touch that left her trembling with need. “Taste that?” he murmured, his breath a soft, hot whisper teasing her lips with the promise of another kiss she desperately wanted. “Taste how much we want each other?”

“Yes,” she whispered before she could stop herself, but then it wasn’t like he didn’t know she’d just melted into him, that he possessed the power to easily seduce her.

“And how easily,” he continued, “we escape the distrust between us when we’re touching each other?” The words lingered in the air, the crackle of desire between them nearly combustible. He was right. At this moment, she could forget everything but him. She could get lost and…and just like that, he released her, stepped back from her, denying her his touch.

“Our hot encounters, Kara, are the closest thing to trust you’ll get in this life, and with someone else, they might get you killed. They make you drop your guard like you did to me in Denver. Get out while you can, Kara. My offer still stands to help you do it. Mendez will never know. I can make you disappear and whatever problem you are trying to deal with by working for him.”

An offer to be his kept woman shouldn’t make her stomach flip-flop, but it did. In some demented and odd way it called forward her long-dead schoolgirl Prince Charming fantasies. Only in those fantasies, Prince Charming hadn’t been a criminal. It was a sobering thought that snapped her back to reality. “No,” she whispered. “That’s just another way of being on someone’s payroll. I’m not interested.”

“I’m offering to get you out, not keep you in with me. Cash, living comfortably, and anything else you need, for as long as you need it.”

Baffled, she stared at him. “Why would you want to help me? You barely even know me. And I didn’t think…”— she stopped herself from saying “men like you”—“…just why?”

Shadows danced deep in his brown eyes, the same tormented kind she’d seen that night in Denver. “You aren’t lost yet.” His voice was a rasp of sandpaper. “Not like me.”

Her mind replayed something she’d said to him back in Denver. If I can be saved, then so can you. He’d replied We aren’t even in the same universe. Believe me. I’m lost. You can still be found. Emotion welled in her chest with the certainty of some deep pain haunting this man. She was right. There was more to Blake than met the eye.

But could she be saved? It depended on how this mission ended. It depended on what it forced her to do. And she’d do anything, absolutely anything to get what she’d come for. “You don’t know me well enough to know that.”