“L-lust?” I swallowed hard.
“Yep. Raw, unbridled lust.” He shifted closer with his body, so we were almost but not quite pressed up against each other. “I take one look at you, and my balls ache and my cock goes hard, and I have to remind myself to behave.”
“What—ahem. Behave? What would you—what would happen if you didn’t behave?”
Why did I ask him that? God. It was like I was actively trying to set him up.
Maybe I was.
He laughed, a deep rumble of amusement, rife with incendiary insinuation. “Eva, sweet thing, I don’t think you could handle knowing that.”
“Don’t tell me what I can’t handle, Baxter Badd,” I snapped. “I’m no fainting, innocent little daisy.”
Yes, actually, I rather was. But I refused to be put into a box by this man, or told what I couldn’t handle.
He now pressed his body up against mine, fully flush. And god, his whole body was hot to the touch despite the cool air, and he was just so…hard. I don’t mean it likethat, though. His muscles, his stomach, his chest, his thighs, he was just hard everywhere, his muscles thick and firm.
Although, he was, in fact, hard likethat. I could feel it. Feel him, pressed against my lower belly, just above my core. Thick, a hard ridge between us.
I couldn’t breathe. My hands shook and my lungs wouldn’t expand all the way, and I was frozen in place, because now all I could feel, all I could think of washim, his…histhing, hard and thick and huge and right there, pressed against me.
“Are you a virgin, Evangeline?” he murmured.
I shook my head. “No…no. I’m not.”
Barely.
“Then you wouldn’t be shocked if I tell you I’mthisclose to tugging those sweatpants down and seeing if I can make you scream loud enough to wake up the neighbors.”
I swallowed hard. “You wouldn’t.”
My brain went fuzzy, shorting out. Feeding me images of him doing exactly that. I could only imagine, though, because that wasn’t in Thomas’s repertoire; such an act would require thinking about something beyond himself and his own pleasure.
“Is that a dare?” he demanded.
His finger hooked in the waistband of the sweatpants, just below my navel.
“No?” I breathed, and it sounded like a question, as if I doubted my own answer.
“You don’t sound convinced.”
I wasn’t.
My imagination was running wild. I was feeling rebellious. Daring. Crazy. I was here, in a city I’d seen literally nothing of except a warehouse, a few streets, the interior of a bar, and an apartment; I was here on my own, alone, in defiance of my father’s wishes, without a plan, without luggage; my phone was turned off, and likely dead now; I’d used my debit card to book the room, and that card drew off my personal, secret account which Father knew nothing about, so he couldn’t easily track me that way.
And I was pressed up against this gorgeous, rugged, dangerous man, a man who had fought in an illegal underground boxing match, and had utterly destroyed his opponent with laughable ease, and then he’d saved me from being assaulted by four men, one of whom had been armed, and he’d destroyed them as well. And he was touching me. He was teasing me, toying with me. But when I said he was crowding me, he’d backed up to give me space. Yet he could read my reactions. He knew I was attracted to him. And I was, intensely.
It’s not like this could…beanything, but why shouldn’t I indulge in a bit of fun? Who would have to know? No one. Only me.
But…like this? Here? God, I was crazy for even hesitating. No: that was the easy, obvious answer.
“Evangeline, I need some words here, honey.” He was breathing hard, and when I peeked up at him, his jaw was clenching and his eyes were narrowed, as if focused and straining.
“Which words?”
He tugged at the waistband, and an inch of my belly was exposed. “I really, really wanna think I’m reading you correctly, here. I feel like you want this, but you’re scared of it. That’s okay. If you want to dabble at being naughty with a Badd boy, sweetheart, I’m your man. I can lead you into temptation and show you the time of your fuckin’ life, and then when you’re ready, you go back to Yale and you’ll have some dirty memories of the time you had some fun with big ol’ Bax in Ketchikan, Alaska.” He tugged a little more. “But if you’re really not sure, you say so, and you’re safe from me. I won’t try nothin’, I’ll just walk you the rest of the way to the Kingsley’s and that’ll be that. But I need to know what you want, either way.”
What did I want? I wasn’t sure. I had no idea.
