Flirting With Disaster

by Ruthie Knox

  Not that Judah wasn’t gorgeous, because he was. He was extraordinarily good-looking. But he wasn’t quite as big as she’d expected him to be, or as much. She’d thought he’d keep on being larger than life, but the more time she spent with him, the more he shrunk down, and now he was precisely life-sized. When he made heavy-lidded, smoldering eyes at her—the same smolder she’d loved on the cover of People—he looked more like a man who’d had three too many shots of tequila than one who wanted to jump her bones.

  But still. Here she was. He was attractive, she was willing, sex was sex. She’d really liked sex once, and she had every intention of liking sex with Judah.

  He lowered his head and nuzzled the exact same spot on her neck that Sean had rasped his face over earlier.

  Nothing happened to her body in response. Nothing.

  Katie decided to cut to the chase. She grabbed his head and tilted it up to lock her mouth over his.

  He made a noise, satisfied and male, and kissed her back. His lips tasted like tequila and lime, which was excellent. She threaded her fingers into his hair.

  He had such great hair. He’d showered before she came up here, and when he answered the door his hair had still been shiny-damp, gleaming under the track lights.

  Come to think of it, wasn’t it still gleaming? It felt kind of stiff under her fingers, like he’d put something in it. Gel? Or one of those pomades her stylist was always trying to sell her?

  Whatever it was, his hair looked fantastic, and it smelled good, too. Like hot sun and beach and … rosemary? Anise? She nibbled his lip and took a deep breath, wanting one more shot at classifying precisely what sort of delicious he was, and her nose wrinkled up.

  Shit. She was going to—

  She sneezed. Thank God, she got her hand up in time, but still, right in his face. How embarrassing.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Can we try that again?”

  Judah smiled, and she smiled right back at him. She couldn’t help it. He was so damned good-looking when he smiled. Smooth skin, amazing cheekbones, perfect lips … So what if his kiss didn’t set her loins aflame? So what? It was a totally adequate kiss. Totally adequate kisses led to totally adequate sex, which would be totally adequate to her purposes.

  He kissed her again, and this time she opened her mouth to receive his tongue, ready for it to be wonderful.

  His tongue was wet.

  Everybody’s tongue was wet, though, right? And it had been a long time since she’d kissed somebody with tongue. A very long time. Maybe she’d forgotten how messy French kissing was. Once they got under way, she’d be more into it, and she wouldn’t notice the saliva-swapping aspect of this encounter quite so much.

  Judah leaned into the kiss, pressing her into the couch. His nose pushed up against her nose, and she couldn’t figure out how she was supposed to carry on breathing and kissing him at the same time. She tried moving her head to one side, but he followed her, and then she tried the other side and that worked.

  Right. Good. Now she could concentrate.

  Katie closed her eyes and focused on the sensation of his hand stroking down her arm, closing over her breast.

  And kneading.

  She’d never been able to see the point of the kneading. Her breast was not a lump of dough. Having it mashed around did nothing for her.

  She arched her back, hoping to encourage a little nipple play, but Judah didn’t take the hint. He just gave her more kneading, which, in combination with the thrusts of his overlarge, overwet tongue into her mouth and the fact that he’d pushed his nose against hers again, sort of made her want to smack him.

  In fairness, it probably wasn’t his fault. Her sex life had become a sad, solitary thing, utterly reliant on her right hand and whatever hot moment she’d plucked out of the week’s erotic novel or soft-focus TV sex scene. What if she’d reconditioned herself to respond only to fictional sex?

  It was a disturbing possibility, and one she had to consider, because here she was with the Sexiest Cock Alive in range, and she wasn’t feeling any zing.

  Her junk was broken.

  Unless it just needed a kick start?

  She rifled through her mental files, trying to come up with some reliable wank material. That scene where the ex-con lumberjack nailed the meek librarian in the stacks? Or the one where the bad-boy Kiwi did dirty things to his sweet, innocent best friend?

  Her brain gave her Sean’s hard face and soft mouth. His big hands. The disturbing look in his eyes right before he kissed her. The look that said, You belong to me, and I’m going to have you.

  She moaned, lifting her hips against Judah’s thigh.

  Wrong thigh, whispered her brain.

  Shut up, she whispered back.

  She shifted, trying to center Judah between her legs and find something worth pushing against, but either he had a dick so small she couldn’t find it or he wasn’t hard yet.

  Katie saw the future then, and it wasn’t pretty. It was endless minutes of ineffectual foreplay, a precarious erection that had to be petted and coaxed into joining the party, a bottle of lube located and put to good use …

  This was precisely why she’d come close to giving up on sex altogether in the last year of her marriage. Because it wasn’t fun. It was work.

  Judah’s mouth moved to the tops of her breasts as his hand pushed her dress up higher. She looked down and saw her fancy panties exposed, his leg thrown over hers, his fingernails dimpling the skin of her thigh.

  She couldn’t. She just couldn’t.

  Sitting up as far as she could, she scooted back a few inches and pulled down her dress.

  “Sorry. I’m not—I don’t think this is … Can we take five?”

  When he looked up from her breasts, unfocused in a way that shouted tequila rather than lust, she smiled as bravely as she could manage.

  “Take five?” he asked.

  “Like a time-out?”

  That sobered him up. “This isn’t a basketball game, sexy. Either you’re going to let me fuck you or you’re not.”

  When he put it that way, she didn’t have any trouble making herself more explicit. “I’m not.”

  His hands were braced on either side of her, pressing his weight into the couch. Crowding her. Judah wasn’t huge, but he was certainly bigger than her, with muscular arms that made her nervous, suddenly.

  Alone with a drunk man in his penthouse suite. A horny drunk man. Oh, genius, Katie. Really genius.

  She cringed away from him, and his head dropped. He exhaled, his hot breath fanning over her chest.

  Then he pushed himself up and retreated to the other side of the couch.

  Katie was so relieved, she had to tuck her bare feet beneath her and put the heel of her hand between her eyebrows and squeeze her eyes closed tight. Tequila did not mix well with humiliation.

  Caleb was right. This had been such a bad idea.

  She monitored Judah from beneath her hand, but he didn’t look as though he planned to attack her. He looked mildly ticked off, as if someone had served him the wrong entree.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  She didn’t know which truth to reveal.

  You don’t turn me on.

  I can’t stop thinking about another guy.

  I’m such a mess, I can’t even tell you.

  None of it exactly calculated to flatter his ego.

  She wondered what Parisian Katie would say in this situation, but that was a dead end. Parisian Katie would never get herself into a scrape like this. Worldly, cosmopolitan women took their lovers to bed, sent them out for coffee and pastry in the morning, and then shooed them home. They didn’t find themselves marooned on couches with drunk celebrities, searching for the right words.

  She looked at her hands. “I guess I just don’t want to.”

  “I thought you were into me.”

  “I thought I was, too. Sorry.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “You’re apologizing?”

  “If I gave
you … you know. Blue balls or whatever.”

  He made a huffing sound of disbelief and shifted a little on the couch. “My balls will survive.”

  She could think of no possible follow-up line to that, so they just sat there for a while, awkwardly silent as she tried to work out what to do next.

  He didn’t seem in any hurry to evict her. She wasn’t in a rush to get back to her room, either—not after what had just happened. Her emotions were a whirling, tangled mess, and she’d rather not sort them out in bed, a few feet away from Sean.

  She’d rather not think about Sean at all. All day long, Sean-related thoughts had been demonstrating a decided tendency to colonize her brain. They multiplied when she wasn’t paying attention.

  “Can I stay here for a few minutes?” she asked.

  “Stay as long as you like.”

  He sounded unfazed by the prospect. It was vaguely insulting, how little he seemed to care that she’d just climbed of his lap. Were women just that interchangeable to him? If she walked out now, would he order another one up from room service?

  And what kind of idiot found that insulting? Just seconds ago, she’d been thanking her lucky stars.

  Judah pushed to his feet abruptly, startling her. “Relax,” he said. “I’m just grabbing the bottle.”

  He carried the tequila over from the bar and lined the shot glasses up on the back of the couch.

  “Hold these.”

  “I don’t need another one.”

  “We have to finish the bottle. Bad luck not to finish it, once it’s open.”

  “That’s not a real rule.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “I used to tend bar, Judah. It’s definitely not a rule.”

  He winked. “We’ll call it a guideline, then.”

  “Do you always finish every bottle of everything?”

  “I try.”

  “That’s kind of scary.”

  Judah smiled. “It’s also kind of easy to do when you drink in threes.” He slopped tequila onto her hand, and it dripped onto the upholstery, but he didn’t seem to notice. He skipped the salt and the lime, handing her the glass.

  She rolled the glass between her palms and watched him knock back his shot.

  He left his head tipped against the cushion and his eyes closed after he swallowed, and she studied his face, noticing the strain around his eyes. The bruised-looking skin beneath them, and the way his mouth turned down at the corners when he wasn’t smiling.

  He’d spent so much time flashing predatory grins at her, she hadn’t noticed it before. He didn’t look happy. He looked exhausted.

  For the first time since she’d met him, she wondered about his motives. Only if I can have Katie, he’d said at the interview in Chicago, but she’d seen men more disappointed about being forced to stop at a yellow light than Judah was that she’d pulled him up short just shy of third base.

  So what did he want her for? She’d made a pretense of talking about the case when she arrived tonight, and he’d blown it off. He’d skipped their meeting yesterday and refused to talk to Sean during the concert.

  Strange behavior.

  A real security agent would make an effort to get to the bottom of it.

  “Judah,” she asked quietly, watching his face for a reaction, “what am I doing here?”

  “Baby, you were supposed to be doing me.”

  He said it with a cocky grin and half-lidded eyes, a caricature of himself.

  She smiled, glad he still had a sense of humor. “You’re Judah Pratt. You could have sex with anybody.”

  That earned her a raised eyebrow.

  “Almost anybody,” she amended.

  “I didn’t want anybody,” he said. “I wanted you.”

  “What for?”

  He shrugged. “Just because. I like you.”

  “That’s not much of a reason. You hardly know me.”

  “I feel like I know you. You’re easy to be around. I said that already, didn’t I?” He cast his eyes at the ceiling, blinked, and then nodded. “Yeah, I did, to your grouchy partner. You relax me. That wasn’t bullshit. You do.”

  “Okay, but that’s not what I mean. What I mean is, why did you hire me? Because it’s not possible that you hired me for my relaxing qualities.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No. I’m not a masseuse. And you didn’t hire me for sex, because that would be despicable.”

  He slanted her a sideways look that said despicable was by no means beneath him.

  “Reprehensible,” she added, and he grinned.

  “All right. I didn’t hire you for sex. I hired you because I need you.”

  “For what?”

  “I have no idea. Sometimes I meet people, and I get a feeling about them. I had a feeling about you.”

  “You’re joking.”

  He closed his eyes again, rolling his head back and forth against the cushion. “I’m dead serious.”

  “What feeling do you have?”

  “You’re important.”

  “Important how?”

  He shrugged. “I like you.”

  “Honest to God, if you tell me you like me one more time, I’m going to knee you in the nuts.”

  “I do like you.”

  She closed her eyes and counted to ten, because Judah had no idea.

  He didn’t know she’d given Levi fourteen years of everything she had. Didn’t know that what she’d gotten in return was a Dear Katie letter that praised her for being such a good friend, such a likable, faithful spaniel of a wife.

  I really like you, Katie.

  Levi had told her that and then skipped town with the contents of their joint bank account, leaving her to close up their business and move home in disgrace.

  And Judah didn’t know, but Jesus, how was it possible that the first guy she’d tried to sleep with since Levi was handing her the same godforsaken line?

  “Judah,” she said. “You hired me and Sean. You had us drive all the way here from Ohio, and then you made us sit around. That was really rude.”

  “I know, but—”

  “And I get the impression you don’t want to talk about these threatening messages you’re supposedly getting. Maybe there aren’t even any messages.”

  “No, there are.”

  “So tell me about them.”

  His forehead wrinkled up. “No.”

  “Tell me something. Tell me why I’m here.”

  He sighed and flung his arms out against the couch cushions. “I don’t know why you’re here,” he said. “You’re just supposed to be.”

  “Supposed to work with you?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Supposed to sleep with you?”

  “I thought so.”

  Katie stared at him for a long time, trying to decide if he was drunk and confused and pitiable or if he was a spoiled celebrity asshole who’d jerked her around because he felt like it. If she had the words Use Me invisibly painted across her forehead.

  Or if he really meant it—if he really believed he needed her.

  And if she cared.

  She did, for some reason that had a lot to do with the dark circles under Judah’s eyes and the real fear she heard in his voice.

  Something was wrong with him. He didn’t trust her enough to tell her, but he seemed to wish he could. She saw it in his eyes. In his face. In the way he rubbed his thumb restlessly over the nap of the suedelike couch cushion.

  She reached out and put a hand on his arm. “Judah, you can trust me. Whatever’s going on that convinced you to bring me and Caleb all the way to Chicago to talk to you, it’s got to be important. It’s got to be, or I wouldn’t be here.”

  He covered her hand with his. The same thing Sean had done, but the touch felt completely different. He opened his eyes and looked right into hers, and for a second she saw through his facade to the real Judah Pratt.

  He wasn’t cocksure at all. He wasn’t drunk, either. He was needy. Guarded and scared.r />
  “I can’t,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t. I don’t trust people. I’m in the music business, Katie. Nobody trusts anybody, and Paul is the master of not-trusting. He trained all the trust out of me. I don’t know how to do it anymore.”

  “You want to tell me,” she said.

  “Part of me wants to.” He took his hand away and leaned forward to retrieve the tequila from where he’d left it on the coffee table. “The rest of me wants to finish off that last set of three with one more shot, then kill the rest of this bottle and pass out.”

  He didn’t bother with the glass this time. He drank straight from the neck with his eyes closed, his Adam’s apple bobbing until he finally pulled the bottle away from his mouth with a gasp.

  “You’re a wreck,” she said.

  He wiped his hand over the back of his mouth and grinned at her again. It was a smile that had sold thousands of records, magazines, and T-shirts. A smile that made her sad, because it didn’t come anywhere near his eyes.

  “You’re quick,” he replied, with a tip of the bottle in her direction. “Another reason I like you.”

  “So what do we do now? You hired me, but you won’t trust me. Do I just go home, or do you expect me and Sean to follow you to Lexington tomorrow and wait for you to change your mind?”

  Judah shrugged. “I guess you do whatever you want.”

  Katie wanted an explanation. She wanted Judah’s trust.

  Neither of those was hers for the taking, and she’d been around enough drunks to recognize that the glimmer of connection she’d felt to him wasn’t likely to return as he worked his way through the rest of the bottle.

  It was late, and she was tipsy. She felt tired, sad, and pawed-over. She wanted to sleep in her own bed, to see her brother and her desk at the office and resume her ordinary, unexciting life.

  She wanted to get this satiny underwear out of the crack of her ass, put on her favorite yoga pants, and be schlubby.

  It was time to go home.

  “Right. Then I’m leaving.”

  Judah dropped his head back, exposing his stubbled throat, and closed his eyes. “Is it still Friday?” he asked.