Exposed. Julie Leto

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СКАЧАТЬ but he couldn’t remember and he certainly didn’t care. The crisp San Francisco night air, clouded with a late-night fog, trailed through her nearly waist-length hair and fluttered the glossy strands toward him. The tendrils teased him with a scent part exotic floral, part crisp ocean—and all woman.

      Without thought, he did as he desired, slipping his hand around her waist and stepping against her full and flush.

      She stiffened slightly and nearly pulled away.

      “I want to hold you,” he said, beginning to accept that simple thoughts and simple explanations were all he could manage while intoxicated by whatever she’d said someone had put in his drink. He doubted her claim anyway. She had drugged him all right, but no pharmaceutical agent was involved.

      She didn’t protest when he curled his right arm completely around her waist, careful to remember that he had to hang on to the cable car with his left. His brain was fuddled, but his heightened senses compensated for his total lack of control.

      He fanned his fingers across her midsection. The texture of her ribbed shirt felt like trembling flesh. When he brushed his fingertips beneath the swell of her breasts, her back firmed, then relaxed, then pressed closer against him.

      He dipped his head to whisper in her ear, “I want to touch you.”

      The cable car rocked and shimmied to a brief halt. A clanging bell blocked her reply, if she’d made one, but when the car moved again, she turned around and traded her handhold on the brass pole for a firm grip around his waist.

      “Where?” she asked.

      She’d pulled her cap low and tight, so the dark brim pushed her bangs down to frame her large eyes. She bent her neck back to see his face, exposing an inviting curve of skin from the tip of her chin to the sensual arc of her throat.

      His mouth felt cottony, but the desire in her eyes spurred a moisture that made him swallow deep. He ran his slick tongue over his lips and when she mirrored the move herself, his blood surged.

      “Where will you touch me?” she asked again.

      He blinked, a thousand thoughts racing through a brain too thick to harness them. The mantra “location, location, location” played silently in his mind then drifted away. Every single place he wanted to touch her—her lips, her throat, her shoulders, her breasts, her belly and beyond—seemed too intimate, too private to speak aloud.

      He’d just have to show her.

      He shook his head, grinning when his dizziness sent him swaying. She gripped him even tighter, giving him an excuse to dip his hold lower, over the swell of her backside, another place he most desperately wanted to touch with his hands and lips and tongue.

      Max decided then and there that he had to accept his current limitations. As he had his entire life, he had to work with his immediate circumstances and the most basic skills at his disposal. His ability to speak was severely hampered. Forming a complex thought was out of the question. But he still had his instincts—natural, unguarded responses to basic, inherent needs. Hers and his.

      “I’m going to touch you wherever you want me to.”

      Her smile was tentative, a little surprised and entirely fascinating—as if he’d said something that shocked her.

      “What if that doesn’t mean what you think it does?”

      He shook his head. Processing that puzzle of a comment was impossible in his condition. He didn’t even consider trying.

      “Whatever that means, I’m game. I’m in no condition to be in charge tonight. You’re going to have to tell me what to do.”

      She chuckled. The sound was warm and deep and soothing like the liqueurs she’d poured in his drink, like the passions he’d kept in check for way too long.

      “You may regret that,” she quipped.

      Somehow, he doubted he’d regret anything about tonight, especially when the cable car slowed at Union Street and she jumped off the car and crooked her finger into his waistband to tug him to follow. So what if someone had supposedly doctored his drink, making his mind so fuzzy he had a hell of a time remembering his address? So what if some crucial reason, currently out of reach, existed why he shouldn’t let this incredibly sensuous woman take him home?

      But no thought, no logic, no amount of reason could override the surge of power he felt even as she fairly dragged him up the sidewalk. He was going to make love to this mysterious woman with the sassy black hat.

      Just as soon as he remembered where the hell he lived.

      3

      ARIANA SLID HER HAT off her head. Her backpack came down off her shoulder with it, but she held tight to the strap so it didn’t touch the polished marble floor. She wasn’t exactly a rube from some hick town, but standing in Maxwell Forrester’s living room certainly made her feel like one. She’d expected wealth, not sheer opulence.

      Everything was white. Pure white. The carpet, the furniture, the walls. Do-not-step-on-or-touch-me white. Glass cases of crystal sculpture reflected sparkling rainbow prisms, but the color was icy, precise. Only Max, a mass of gray and brown and flesh tone who shuffled in front of her before he flopped on the couch, shedding shoes and jacket and tie along the way, warmed the room with subtle invitation.

      “Could you dim the lights? I had no idea I’d installed three-hundred-watt bulbs in my living room.”

      Ariana grinned. Filthy-stinking-rich or not, Max was in bad shape and needed her help. They’d walked nearly three blocks to his house and, with each step, the playfulness he’d enticed her with on the cable car had begrudgingly faded away. Right now he was in no condition to tell her where the light switch was, never mind detailing how and where he was going to seduce her. Maybe things were working out for the best. She would dim the lights, make sure he was comfortable and get the heck out of Dodge before she made a huge mistake.

      But first she had to find the light switch. She searched fruitlessly, soon realizing that when they’d first come in, Max hadn’t flipped any switches. He’d opened the door, they’d walked in and, snap, the lights had flared to life.

      Oh, great. A house that was smarter than she was.

      She backed up in the foyer and reluctantly laid her ratty leather backpack in the corner closest to the door and propped her hat on top, running her fingers through her windblown hair while she scanned the wall for a control panel that simply had to exist.

      “Ariana? Are you still here?”

      His voice was a mere whisper, but the sound still stopped her, warmed her—frightened the hell out of her. There was no mistaking the sound of hope mingling with the possibility of utter disappointment if she didn’t answer, if she’d abandoned him in his glittering marble palace.

      She found the switches behind a thick drape and slid the controls until the recessed lights shone like subtle moonlight rather than like the outfield at Candlestick Park.

      “I’m here. Is that better?”

      He’d removed his arm from across his eyes, then slid his elbows along his sides and propped himself up. “Now I can’t see you.”

      She СКАЧАТЬ