by Ruthie Knox
He wanted that smile directed at him, and there was absolutely no way that was going to happen. He’d walked out on her like a coward, and now whenever she looked in his direction, she shot laser beams at him with her eyes.
The drive to the High Hat from the hotel had simmered with hostility.
Judah finished his song, announced a ten-minute break, and disappeared offstage. As half the crowd headed toward the bar, Sean moved in the opposite direction, navigating the press of bodies to make his way to Katie.
She was talking to Paul when he reached the booth, but she saw him and stood. Sean gestured toward the door by the stage, raising his eyebrows, and she inclined her head in agreement.
“You guys can’t get back to see him right now,” Paul said. “He’s busy. He’ll talk to you after the show.”
Sean looked at Katie and shook his head slightly. They were going to see Judah. It was time.
“Sorry,” Katie said to Paul. There was no hint of apology in her voice. “We’ll make it quick.”
She whirled around, her dress fanning out to give Sean a brief, mouth-watering glimpse of thigh, and led the way backstage.
He’d never known anyone quite so kinetic as Katie. She moved with such purpose. Her arms swung, and he watched the muscles shift along the bare length of back exposed by her dress, hypnotized.
Pratt broke the spell. As soon as he caught sight of Katie from down the length of the narrow hallway behind the stage, he was on his feet, striding toward them with a big, smarmy smile lighting up his face.
“Katie! Where have you been, baby? You look hot enough to melt glass.”
He folded her into a hug. Katie beamed. “Right back at you. And you sound amazing! The new songs are incredible.”
Judah let go of her to run one hand up the back of his neck, and even Sean noticed the way his sweat-damp T-shirt stuck to his muscular chest. Jesus.
“Thanks,” Judah said. “So what have you been up to? You hit town this afternoon, right?”
“Mmm-hmm,” Katie said. “We’ve been chilling out, mostly.”
Chilling out. For the love of—
“This is my partner, Sean Owens.”
She didn’t take her eyes off Pratt when she said it, but she did at least wave her hand toward where he stood, close behind her and to the right.
“Nice to meet you, man.” Judah extended his hand so Sean had no choice but to take it.
He had a firm shake, but Sean made sure his was firmer. He didn’t crush the guy’s fingers or anything. That would be childish. He simply ensured Pratt knew which of them had the advantage of twenty additional pounds of muscle. And yeah, he stepped close enough to make sure Pratt registered the discrepancy in their heights, too.
Katie brought out the caveman in him.
When Sean released Judah’s hand, the singer placed his palm against the wall and leaned in toward her, a relaxed move that said he owned this crowded hallway, with its bustling techs and musicians, and he owned her, too.
Was it naive of Sean to think Katie might step away, making it clear her relationship with Pratt was a professional one, at least in public? To hope she would ask him some questions before she started flirting?
It was.
Katie asked Pratt something about one of the songs, leaning her shoulder against the wall and bending one knee so the skirt of her black dress flattened enticingly over the long, lean expanse of her thigh. In heels, she stood nearly as tall as Judah. With their black hair and olive skin, their matching dark eyes and wide smiles, the pair of them looked like they’d emerged from the same mold.
And Sean was fifteen years old again, sick with furtive jealousy, watching Katie and her boyfriend, Levi, make out under the eave by the high school entrance as he hurried to class.
For Christ’s sake.
This wasn’t going to happen. Not like this. Katie could sleep with Pratt after lights-out if she wanted to, but they had a job to do, and he wasn’t going to stand here like a eunuch watching her flirt with the guy.
So stop them.
Mrs. Guzman had warned him to be careful. If he tried to dodge the stutter too many times—to go around it rather than talk through it—it learned to anticipate his tricks. Substitute one word for another often enough, and soon he’d be blocking on the substitute, too. It was how he’d become effectively speechless by high school.
But these were desperate times.
Even visualization wasn’t as simple as it should have been. There was no pretending Judah was one of his board members, not when he and Katie were practically entwined. There would be no shutting out her presence the way he’d done yesterday.
What would it take for him to feel relaxed enough with Katie to speak to her? He could think of only one situation that fit the bill, and it involved his getting acquainted with what she had on under that dress. It had him moving his hands up her legs and learning the shape of her hips. Peeling down those spaghetti straps to kiss her breasts. Covering her wide, smiling mouth with his as he moved inside her body.
Him. Not Pratt. Him.
So he told himself he’d done it. Before they left the suite for the High Hat, he’d gotten his hands on Katie exactly the way he’d wanted to since the first day he saw her in the office. He’d kissed her. He’d touched her. He’d thrust into her, and she’d loved every second of it.
He could smell her now, that fresh, citrusy perfume warming up on her sweat-slick skin until it filled the hall and the deeper, earthier smell of her sex filled his senses. Sean had put his mouth on every inch of her. He’d buried his face between her legs and made her come. And he was going to do it again, just as soon as they got rid of this twit and went back to the room. He was going to spend the rest of the night making sure Katie never forgot his name.
“Tomorrow,” he said to Judah, interrupting their conversation. He didn’t get caught on the t sound. He wouldn’t stutter tonight. Sean Owens owned his own Internet security company and a custom-built four-thousand-square-foot house in San Jose. He had a gardener and a housekeeper. He knew how to make Katie moan with pleasure, and he didn’t fucking stutter.
“We’re going to talk tomorrow morning,” he said.
Judah raised an eyebrow. His posture had stiffened.
“Nine a.m.,” Sean specified. “All three of us. And I want you to block out at least two hours for the meeting. We have a lot to discuss.”
Katie glared at him, clearly unhappy he’d taken charge of the conversation. He’d cheer her up later. He’d push her up against that brick wall in their hotel room and make her a happy woman. Right now, they had work to do.
Judah smiled his stage smile and said, “Can’t, sorry. I’m heading out early tomorrow. I have some people to see on the way to Lexington.”
“When, then?” Sean asked.
Pratt shrugged. “What’s the rush?”
A muscle jumped in Sean’s jaw, but he tamped down his anger. Judah didn’t bear him any personal malice. He just considered him another cog in the great wheel of his life, a dispensable minion who would jump to do his bidding.
Sean was no man’s minion.
“Katie and I are professionals,” he said. “We’re here to help you. If you want our help, you have to level with us. If you don’t, we’re leaving in the morning, and you can find somebody else to screw with.”
Judah’s smile faded, his expression shifting toward inscrutable.
Sean pushed a little harder. “Good luck with that, by the way. Finding somebody else. Because Katie and I are the best team around at what we do.”
Pratt’s gaze flicked from Katie’s face to Sean’s, then back to Katie’s, as if he hadn’t given the dynamic between the two of them any thought, but now he was giving it plenty.
Good. Sean stepped closer to Katie and settled his hand over the warm, exposed skin at the middle of her back, his fingertips stealing inside the open drape of her dress to curve around her waist. She stiffened, but Pratt wasn’t looking at her when she did it. Sea
n had captured his attention.
They stared at each other.
She’s mine. You can’t have her.
Judah smirked. Watch me.
“I think we’re getting off on the wrong foot here,” the singer said. “I just had a really full schedule today.” Pratt looked at Katie and smiled. This time, she didn’t smile back. She remained tense beneath Sean’s hand.
He stroked his fingers up her bare back, willing her to relax. She took a deep breath and softened as she exhaled. Going along with him, even if she didn’t like it.
The tiny part of his brain that remained painfully aware this was all a trick—that he was a stammering freak and Katie Clark was and always would be out of his league—marveled at that.
“So we meet tonight,” Sean said. “After the show.”
“No,” Judah said, with no trace of apology. “I don’t think so. I don’t want to go ten rounds with you in a hotel room when I need to be unwinding so I can get some sleep.”
Cocking his head to the side, the singer looked at Katie. “You, though. You relax me. Ginny said you’re staying at the same hotel as me, so why don’t you come by my room after the show, and I’ll … bring you up to speed? Then you can talk to your partner here, and we’ll meet tomorrow afternoon in Lexington to cover anything else we need to discuss.”
Sean’s fingers bunched the silky fabric of Katie’s dress into a fist at the base of her spine, and she turned toward him in response, raising her face to his in a silent challenge. She looked confused, irritated, and—
And aroused, damn it.
Knowing that Pratt was turning her on with his skeevy invitation messed with Sean’s concentration. He couldn’t allow that. He had to focus. He and Pratt were playing a serious game here, their polite conversation barely disguising a battle over the job and a battle over Katie. Sean didn’t intend to lose either one.
He took advantage of the angle of her body to pull her closer. Mine, he told her silently. Not his. Mine.
Her pupils dilated in the shadow he cast over her, and suddenly he wasn’t pretending. He’d never looked right into her eyes before, never stood this close to her. Never put his hands on her the way he’d wanted to.
Her lips parted on a soft inhalation.
Sean didn’t even think about it. He just lowered his head and kissed her.
She tasted of lip balm, waxy and minty, her mouth warm and full. He kept his eyes open to admire the curved sweep of her lowered eyelashes. She would pull away soon. She would beat his chest, slap him, laugh at him.
But she hadn’t done it yet, and when he eased away to breathe, she exhaled and swayed toward him, tilting her chin up a fraction of an inch.
Instinct took over. He angled his head and brought her closer with the flat of his hand on her back so he could kiss her harder and deeper.
This was what he’d wanted to tell her earlier in the room. This.
Her energy moved into him where they touched, thighs and mouths and his palm on her bare skin, the other wrapped around the nape of her neck. The pleasure of smelling her, touching her, unhitched something essential he kept reined in, and he felt the sudden rush of it, the terrible freedom of losing control—
And that made him stop.
What the fuck was he doing? Kissing Katie in public, in front of Judah? He was out of his mind.
When he pulled away, she made a sound, a sort of helpless squeak that said she wanted to continue, and hearing it called up a desperate ache in his chest that he immediately locked down.
Appalling, what she did to him. He wanted her. Right here, right now, with that black dress bunched up around her thighs. He wanted her anywhere, everywhere, any way he could get her.
All these weeks that he’d been attracted to Katie and done nothing about it, he’d never counted on this—this appalling need. He’d kissed her, angry and possessive, and her response had unhinged him somehow. Probably he deserved it—an ironic punishment that he would appreciate if it weren’t so fucking dangerous. He was kissing her in a hallway, for Christ’s sake. In front of a client.
And worst of all, even now, after his sense had returned, it would take nothing more than one push from her, one smile, one crook of her finger, and he’d do it all over again.
He took a step back, trying to project an ease he didn’t feel. Whatever it was that Katie did to him, he couldn’t afford it. He had to finish this job for Caleb, and then he needed to get back to California and focus on his own company.
Best to keep his attention where it belonged.
“If you want to talk to her, I’ve got no problem with it,” he said to Judah. It pleased him to hear his voice come out the way it was supposed to, smooth and even and unaffected. He was being an enormous asshole—more of an asshole than he could ever recall being before, which was saying something—but at least he was an asshole who could talk. “Just don’t keep her up too late.”
He shot a look at Katie. Her chest rose and fell rapidly. Her eyes were absolutely furious. With good reason, since he’d just publicly staked her like an unclaimed piece of property, then passed her along to another man.
I’m not usually like this, he wanted to tell her. I just need to get far, far away from you.
“See you in the room, sweetheart,” he said.
Sean returned to his post at the bar, leaving Katie and Judah to work out their own arrangements.
Chapter Seven
Katie kept reviewing her situation, but it came out the same every time: she was in the penthouse suite of a swanky hotel, on a couch with the sexiest man alive.
Officially the sexiest, according to People magazine. The issue featuring Judah decorated her bedside table at home. He lounged on the cover in a white linen suit, looking thoroughly edible.
But that was in Camelot. She was in Kentucky, and in Kentucky, in this suite, Judah Pratt was shirtless and disheveled, and he had one hand on her bare thigh. Their game of sexual one-upmanship had been drawing them closer together ever since she walked through his door, and now she had her legs across his lap, and she couldn’t stop staring at his hand. The sexiest hand alive. On her thigh.
He had excellent fingernails, square and neat. Only a manicure gave you fingernails that nice. Did men get manicures?
She thought maybe rich men did.
Yes, she was a little tipsy. Judah had some kind of superstition that dictated shots had to be downed in multiples of three, so she’d done two to his four in order to make six, and then when she’d wanted another one he’d had to do two more—all over a rather short period of time, since his superstition also forbade setting the glass down once he’d poured it.
The magazines loved to play up that side of Judah’s personality—the way he never stepped on cracks, left rooms through the same door he’d entered, tossed salt over his shoulder to ward off evil. She’d wondered if it was a role he put on for the press, but apparently not.
Unless he’d put it on for her, too, in the interest of getting her drunk. But if that was the case, she was happy to play along.
Tequila turned out to be just the thing to tip a girl in the direction of “torrid and inadvisable.” With every shot she and Judah knocked back, they’d teased each other a little more dangerously, until they were swapping innuendo so outrageously that the sexual possibility she’d been chasing since she met him in Chicago had become a sordid inevitability.
Bring it on. Under her dress, she wore the sexiest piece of lingerie she’d ever owned. Hot pink, satiny, and scandalously skimpy, it caressed her every time she shifted on the couch. Her underwear was turning her on. That was good, right?
It had to be good. Because Judah Pratt, Sexiest Man Alive, was going to kiss her any second. And when he did, she was going to start to want him.
“Katie?” he asked in that velvety voice, the same deep rumble she’d gone shivery for a hundred times.
“Yeah?”
“You and Sean …”
“Are coworkers.”
S
ean wasn’t allowed in this room. He wasn’t allowed in her head, either. She would not think about what he’d done at the club tonight. The unexpected sensation of his huge, warm hand moving up her naked back. The goose bumps. That kiss. That kiss like someone had taken all her blood and replaced it with lava without her permission.
It had been such a dick move, that kiss. A power play to keep her away from Judah. Sean had probably agreed to it as a favor to Caleb. She could just imagine them on the phone.
Help me out and keep her away from that guy, will you?
Sure, man. Whatever you say.
Infantile boy-men and their territory-claiming games. She didn’t answer to Sean, or to Caleb, either. She couldn’t be branded with a kiss like a steer or claimed with one word whispered in her ear by a man who otherwise refused to talk to her.
When they got back to the room after the concert, she’d taken a card from Parisian Katie’s deck and paid him back. She’d placed her high-heel-clad foot on a chair, bent over right in front of him, and unbuckled and refastened the strap, making sure she was showing off the maximum amount of everything without actually flashing him.
Take that, Sean Owens.
She wouldn’t think about his expression afterward. The tension in his jaw. The way his fingers had bit into the edge of the mattress, white-knuckled.
“Just coworkers?” Judah asked.
“Just coworkers.”
“Because I try not to poach.”
“I’m not a pheasant,” she said, rather more vehemently than she’d intended. “Sean hasn’t bagged me.”
“If you say so, sexy.”
He really needed to stop calling her “sexy,” because they were not on television, and it was not 1978, and he did not have a mustache and a giant pelt of curly chest hair.
Or maybe she just needed to lighten up. It was harder than she’d expected to get into the spirit of things. It might have been different if she were still nineteen—if she’d never spent days at a time carrying her clothes on her back and peeing in the woods—but she’d lived the last decade in the real world, and it turned out her celebrity crush wasn’t translating as seamlessly into reality as she’d hoped.