Any minute now, she was going to tell him to go to hell.
Any minute now, he would feel just as confused as he’d been that night when she’d acted as if their kisses hadn’t affected her as much as they had him. If she’d been as turned inside out as he was, she would’ve believed him about Jay and the camera. Or at least she would’ve come back to him after accepting his explanations.
But Margot surprised him, reaching out to touch one of the scarves hanging from the dressing screen.
Could keeping her in this room really be that easy?
“You went to a lot of work,” she said.
“I take my investments seriously.”
Holding his breath, he stepped toward her, daring to touch her hair.
Soft. Just as silky as one of those scarves. His blood screamed through him.
As he skimmed his hand downward, over her shoulder blade, he heard her inhale.
Was she going to run?
Or would she stay and let him make every fantasy he’d had over the past ten years come true?
* * *
EVEN WITH THE silk of her shirt as a barrier between his fingers and her skin, Margot could feel the heat of him seeping into her, flowing downward, flooding her with jagged pinpoints of need.
Her pride told her to get out of there, but her body...
Her body wasn’t moving, just like the other night when he’d waylaid her in the parking lot, touching her, flirting with her until she’d almost melted into his arms.
She was pounding all over, craving him in a way that only a memory could bring on—a memory of that night the camera had recorded them.
Part of her wanted to show him that he would never have her. Show him that she wasn’t going to lose this contest of wills between them.
The other part of her knew it was a bad, bad idea to be here at all, because he was Clint Barrows, bane of her existence.
But it was another, steamier part that was winning yet again. Hands down.
Shivers spilled through her as his fingertips traced down her back, over her spine. Shivers that speared her, tingling, destroying every resisting thought.
His voice was low, hot.
“Your basket promised eighty ways around a girl,” he said, his breath stirring the hair by her ear. “But I’ll bet I could find eighty other ways all on my own, without your help.”
He skimmed his fingertips to the base of her spine, slipped under her blouse, touched her with the lightest of strokes.
She flinched at the bare contact.
“Seems I’ve found number one,” he said.
God, he sounded so arrogant. And why shouldn’t he be when he was reducing her to a pool of thick honey and making her stay when she knew she should go?
He found the zipper at the back of her suede skirt, and when he started to pull it down, the sound ripped through her.
Stay? Go?
Her mind was a mess, reeling with desire.
As he tucked a finger between her and the skirt, skimming just over the line of her panties, she bit her lip, keeping herself from responding. Even so, a little moan escaped her.
“Way number two,” he said.
He left her zipper partly open, resting his other hand on her hip, then tugging lightly at the waistline. Air hushed against her exposed skin, and she turned her face away from him.
It’d be a good time to tell him to stop.
A real good time.
When he coaxed a finger into her skirt, exploring her hipbone, then wandering over to whisk over her belly, her stomach muscles jumped, and she leaned forward, one hand seeking the low dresser for balance.
“Three,” he said.
As he ran that finger down toward her panty line, she canted forward a bit more, both hands on the dresser now, her breath sharp, hard to come by.
He coasted his finger beneath the front elastic of her panties, back and forth, stirring her up until she was stiff and achy and oh-so drenched.
Four, she thought.
He didn’t have to count anymore as he went lower, more aggressive now, sliding that finger between her folds, making her take a step forward and gasp, then part her legs for him.
What was she doing?
It didn’t matter, because she’d already given him all the permission he needed to do whatever it was he’d planned. And she didn’t care.
Didn’t care one damned bit now.
As he caressed her, up, down, around her clit, she didn’t try to stay cool with him anymore. A moan escaped her, and she pressed back against him, feeling his erection.
He cupped a breast with his other hand, his mouth at her ear. “You were already wet for me, Margot.”
She ignored the taunt, moving with every motion he made, instead.
Hadn’t she imagined something like this in the shower yesterday? His hands, his fingers, then his mouth, all over her, building up a fire in her, pressure, pushing down, up, out, all over the place until—
He thrust two fingers up and into her, and she cried out, mostly because his thumb was working her clit with masterful care, just as if he’d already gone eighty times around her and wasn’t about to stop there.
In, out... She wasn’t going to last much longer, not with this need to explode. Not with the stiffness of his cock pressed against the back of her.
She wanted him to rip off her skirt, her panties, then pound all the way into her...
Bringing her higher...
Pushing her faster, harder—
An orgasm ripped through her with such force that she sucked in a breath that nearly cut her in two. Once. Then again. And he kept massaging her clit until she couldn’t stand anymore and she was suddenly on the floor, boneless, clutching at the dresser. He’d come down to the ground with her, his hand still in her panties as if he owned that part of her.
Now she really couldn’t move. Too weak. Too...
She had to admit it. She’d never reacted this way with any man in any country, whether he was a seductive stranger she’d built up in her mind to ooo-la-la levels or if he was a short-term fling she’d lost interest in after they’d gotten what they’d needed from each other.
As he pulled out of her, she almost told him not to. He felt too right in her, and she wondered just how right more of him than his fingers would feel. But she also wondered what the college girl who had been humiliated by a joke—and, truthfully, crushed by the realization that Clint really was just a Casanova—would’ve thought if she could see adult Margot now.
She was slumped back against him, and when she realized that his arm was cradled over her—his possessive, muscled arm—a shock of warmth tumbled through her.
It felt like...affection. But that was impossible when she and Clint Barrows didn’t know each other from Eve and Adam.
He was straightening her skirt, tugging it to cover her modestly, and that struck her, too. It struck her so hard that she straightened up and got to her knees, pushing his arm away from her as she took up the job of fixing her own clothes.
“Well,” she said. “I guess you got a good return on your investment.”
He didn’t answer, and without thinking, she peered over her shoulder to see why.
His knees were up, his arms resting on them. Somewhere along the way, his cowboy hat had fallen off, and his golden hair was mussed.
Her heart jerked in her chest, the dumb thing.
“Believe it or not,” he said, “I wanted to take this step by step with you.”
“Take what?”
He laughed. “Whatever was going to happen with us.”
Now she laughed, but it wasn’t out of gaiety. “You’re sure full of yourself, aren’t you? Bringing me in here and thinking...”
“That something would hap
pen?” He glanced at her waistline, where her blouse was still untucked. “Call me crazy.”
She didn’t know whether to hate him or hop on him. Truthfully, though, she knew it wasn’t Clint she hated—it was the fact that she’d given in without much of a fight, and she wanted to do a lot more of it, too.
Clint sighed, running a hand through his hair roughly. “Margot, if you’re thinking that you’re going to come out of this room looking like a fool because you got together with me, don’t. What happened in the past is water under the bridge.”
“Not when everyone was served up a memory the other night, after that video rose from the dead.” She had already gotten to her feet.
His chest constricted. “No one cares. Let it go.”
“Why? Why is it so important?”
He raised both hands, then let them fall back down. “I told you—I feel bad for everything that happened.”
He said it as if there was more.
But she didn’t want to press him. Once she got back home, real life would take over. No more baskets, no more of the animating spark that Clint seemed to bring to her life.
A blush roared up to her face at the realization that he was more than just an enemy. Wait until everyone heard about this. Wait until they were all laughing over their beers, acting like college kids again, gossiping about how Clint Barrows had finally closed the deal.
He seemed to read her thoughts. “They wouldn’t have to know.”
She stared at him as his meaning sank in. She’d told him that once, before kissing him on his college couch.
He grinned that Romeo grin. “If you want to show me the rest of what’s in that basket tonight—and just tonight—no one would ever be the wiser. And I mean that.”
Her sense of adventure flared up, but there was more to it than that.
Her body wouldn’t forget what he had done to it, and she was already hungering for more. Damn her crazy libido, she was already jonesing for something that had been absolutely unthinkable just a night before, and she didn’t know how it’d happened or even when she’d made the choice for it to happen.
Slowly, she tucked in her blouse. And, in spite of everything, when she was done, she decided to tell Clint Barrows just what he could do with that basket.
6
DAMN, MARGOT WAS a tease.
After their encounter, Clint had retreated to familiar ground, going with Riley to the Phi Rho Mu house just off the Cal-U campus. The fall leaves colored the trees and, in the distance, the hills rolled off beyond the brick dorms, academic buildings and the ranchland and orchards that were used to teach hands-on classes to the majority of agriculture students.
He’d thought that getting away from the hotel and sitting here by the pool with some of his brothers at his old fraternity would clear his head, but nope.
He just kept thinking about earlier in the day, after Margot had tucked in her shirt and straightened out her clothes and hair.
She’d sauntered around the room, and he’d known that she was checking for a camera. Satisfied there was none, she’d gone over to her basket on the dresser and almost defiantly brought it over to him. He’d just stared at her while she’d let out an exasperated breath.
“You already know how this works,” she said. “You just reach in and pick out a slip of paper.”
Was she messing with him? Just a few minutes ago, she’d seemed ready to kick him to the curb for going too far with her.
Not knowing exactly what she was up to, he’d drawn a folded piece of paper from the basket. He barely even read the words before handing it back to her.
She’d taken one look at it, put the basket on the dresser again, grabbed a truffle and a croissant from the tray he’d put together and left the room.
But not before she’d flung one last comment over her shoulder.
“Nine o’clock, my room.”
And that was it.
Had she just agreed to experience one of those eighty ways with him tonight?
As Clint mulled over the possibility, he was brought back to the present by an object hitting him in the shoulder. It didn’t take him long to see what it was—a wet, spongy ball that some Phi Rho Mu pledges had been zinging at each other in the whirlpool in a game of close-quarter dodgeball.
Clint threw it right back at them, hitting a redheaded pledge in the chest.
All the older guys sitting in lounge chairs around the pool were entertained, including Riley. He was right next to Clint, wearing a baseball cap over his dark hair, protecting his Irish skin from the mild central California sun.
“Rise and shine, Barrows,” he muttered.
So Riley had noticed he was a little out of it. Before Clint could explain why, all the brothers who were lounging at the side of the pool, whether they were part of the ten-year reunion or active, started barking orders at the pledges.
Clint hadn’t been the only one who’d come to his college stomping grounds to relive old times during the reunion.
“Out of the cushy spa, scrubs!”
“Recite those stud numbers!”
“Into the big pool—now!”
Clint took a drink of his beer. It was as flat as his enthusiasm for joining in.
“Was that all we did back then?” he asked Riley as the other brothers surrounded the pledges. “Haze our underlings, drink beer all the time and generally act like idiots?”
“Pretty much.” Riley set his bottle down on the concrete as he watched the pledges swim as many laps as the brothers told them to.
Clint glanced at Riley. Something wasn’t sitting right with his friend today, either.
“Did the girls take Dani out this afternoon?” Clint asked, thinking that Riley’s “something” probably had to do with his fiancée.
He shifted in his chair. “Dani’s in the room, resting. I think she’s looking at wedding stuff on our laptop. Margot and Leigh’s enthusiasm seems to have gotten to her.”
Clint recalled what Riley had told him the other day about not being able to give Dani the perfect wedding. Clearly, it was still eating away at him.
Now that Riley had started, he was on a roll. “There’re times I wonder if Dani just isn’t telling me how disappointed she is in how things have turned out with us. Margot and Leigh are helping her find reasonable alternatives to that grand wedding she always wanted, but...”
“But those alternatives aren’t what you would give her if you could. You told me all about it.”
Riley took a drink. He didn’t have to answer.
Clint watched his brothers hazing those pledges, making them cling to the sides of the pool and kick their legs in a contest to see who lasted the longest. A thought hit him, just as that sponge ball had bopped into his shoulder earlier.
“You have a place for that wedding?” he asked Riley.
“Not so far.”
Clint smiled. “Maybe I can at least help you out with that part.”
He mentioned his ranch—the wide-open spaces, the grassy lawn, the guest cottages and the gazebo where his own parents had gotten hitched once upon a time.
When Clint was done, Riley was leaning forward in his chair, a big smile on his face.
Clint went back to his beer. Riley couldn’t have missed how much he loved that ranch, and Clint didn’t want to make a big deal out of it.
Mostly, though, he didn’t want to think about how much it’d hurt to lose it.
“You’d go through all the trouble of having a major ruckus like a wedding on your spread?” Riley asked, instead of commenting on Clint’s emotional slip.
“Of course. The twins are talking legal threats right now, but they won’t be able to take the ranch away by the end of the year, when you were planning to get hitched, so why not?” He shrugged. “You know it�
�s not a big deal. Besides, you’ve been there and you know it’d work for you.”
They grinned at each other, friend to friend. Then Riley’s smile got a little devilish. “Okay, I’ll ask Dani about it. But let me know if there’re any favors I can do for you—getting you some nice wine from my boss’s vineyard, putting in a good word for you with Margot...”
No one will ever know, he’d told Margot about tonight.
No one. Not even their friends.
So he kept his end of the bargain. “Didn’t you hear that she’s planning to give me my money back on that basket?”
“She can’t do that.”
“I won’t force her to do something she doesn’t want to.”
Riley looked disappointed for him. And, for all Clint knew, maybe tonight wouldn’t be worth lying to his friend about, anyway. Was Margot going to pull the rug out from under him by leaving him stranded outside her door, horny and expectant? Would she initiate an even bigger joke if he got inside her room, set on revenge for the embarrassment she’d suffered all those years ago?
Hell, he’d take his chances after what’d happened with her earlier today. Thinking about it made his cock threaten to go stiff again.
Riley said, “Just so you know, there’s been a lot of talk in this house from some of the visiting brothers. You sure have tongues wagging.”
“Because of the basket.”
“Because of you and Margot, together again. ‘The fraternity stud and the unfortunate girl who got her pride dented by a camera.’”
Clint pushed back the brim of his hat. “Is it bad of me to wish that it was more than just her pride that was dented?”
“What do you mean?”
Maybe this would be a good time to shut up. But it wasn’t as if Clint could go home and bounce this off his twin brothers. “I mean that I’ve always wondered if she got angry just about the camera...or if there was something more to it.”
His friend waited, and when Clint didn’t offer anything else, Riley said, “You can’t say it, can you?”
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