Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(40)

She wrapped her arms around her knees under the bathrobe, looking vulnerable and confused.

“What did you think it was?”

“Escape,” she said. “It makes me feel really alive. And I stop thinking.”

Yeah. Tenderness softened him. Jesus, the emotional place this whole thing left him in. Fascinated by her, just starting in on the flirting that he’d hoped would lead to more, and—bam. Used for sexual release. As if all those women from when he was a stupid-ass twenty-year-old had finally brought their karma back on him with a vengeance.

He smoothed one of her curls off her face, despite himself. “They’re not mutually exclusive.”

“Heroism and escaping?” she said wryly.

His palm opened to curve against her cheek. “You live to fight another day,” he reminded her.

Her eyes flickered.

“Not literally fight,” he said quickly. Idiot! “That’s why you’ve got these guards on you.”

Her expression schooled itself to neutrality. He had a very bad feeling that she was imagining the waste a suicide bomb could make of him, her guards, possibly her friends or innocent civilians in the area, and her all together. He tugged one curl of hair sharply to shatter the thought. Don’t go there. At least she couldn’t see what that would actually look like.

He could.

“But what you do every day when you go back in those kitchens and make something ridiculously beautiful again. That kind of fighting,” he said. It made him want to kiss her just thinking about it.

Yeah, but if he started kissing her on the mouth, he’d get too emotionally involved and…Jesus, now he felt like he should star in Pretty Woman.

She gazed at him a long moment. Her face crumpled again. “You should not be having sex with me if you hate it. That’s screwed up, for one thing. And it makes me feel yucky.”

“Hate is maybe too simple a word for a very complex feeling.”

Her nose crinkled in a way that was so kissable it was killing him. “You mean, like you want it, but you hate yourself for it? Like something kinky?”

One of his eyebrows went up involuntarily. He tilted his head, scanning her from curly black head to the tip of her toes—chipped polish, like someone who had last kept her toenails all pretty a couple of weeks ago and now could barely remember them. Yep, he’d definitely gone insane, because it kind of made him wish he knew how to paint toenails, so he could set her feet on his thigh and do them for her. “Is there something kinky you find intriguing?”

Her face crinkled more in confusion. “Isn’t this kinky?”

He laughed out loud. His hand pressed his belly as it burst out of him, the laughter out of nowhere almost a painful pleasure. He shook his head, trying not to laugh so long he offended her. “You might have a narrower range of kinky than I do.”

She looked a little worried.

He found himself stretching out on the bed beside her, as he got lured into greater and greater intimacy, despite every instinct for self-preservation. Granted, he didn’t have many such instincts, but emotionally he usually did. “Don’t worry,” he said, amused and possessive and gentle and all those crazy, dangerous things at once. He rested his hand on her hip. “I won’t do anything you don’t want.”

“Well, no, I know that,” she said.

He smiled a little, relieved by her growing trust in him. When she’d said that thing about waterboarding, it had hurt like hell. He was used to women and children being scared of him, especially when their team didn’t have a female MP or interpreter along to help reassure them, but he’d never learned to like it.

“That’s why I showed you that rose,” she said, a little glint in her eye. “So you’d understand the possible consequences of trying to do anything I don’t want.”

He started to laugh again, which was quite a feat on her part, given that the image she was evoking was of his cock shattered in small frozen pieces like those rose petals. “I’m fairly warned.”

She grinned at him.

Shit, this was getting too cute. This was hellishly unfair behavior by a woman who was just using him for sex.

But he found himself curving his hand around hers anyway, playing with her fingers. Because you’re an idiot, he reminded himself.

Fools rush in…

She sure would make a nice angel, though. One of those naughty, fallen angels who hadn’t quite lost all her memories of innocence but who had developed a taste for black feathers and messing with poor mortals.

Her gaze drifted over his body in a way that made him feel glad he was only wearing a towel. Nice to show off. “You are quite honestly the hottest man I have ever seen,” she said and shook her head wonderingly.

Well, now, that was nice to know.

“How do you get such a great body?”

“They don’t feed me enough in the Navy.” He tried for pitiful. Hell, it worked for Chase.

She smiled at him. “Want me to make you something?”

Actually, he’d been thinking he might want to get over his affronted virgin issues and curve his hand over her hip and pull her in a little closer. But his mouth opened and closed as the idea ran through him. He’d loved the way she had fed him tastes in her kitchen, as if she just couldn’t stand to leave his mouth bored while hers was having so much fun. It made him feel vulnerable, like he could get too used to having someone beautiful in his life, but he’d loved it just the same.