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He’s all wrong for me, and I want him. I want him more than I’ve ever wanted anything.
“I… I have to go.” My voice sounds choked as I yank my hand out of his grip and stand up, nearly turning over my chair in my haste to get away. Spinning around, I rush to the coat check like the coward that I am, the scenes he evoked playing in my mind like a graphic movie.
I almost have my coat when a big hand reaches past me, grabbing it before I can. I look up, my pulse accelerating further as I meet that cool blue gaze.
“Let me take you home,” Marcus says quietly, and I stare up at him, powerless to do anything else as he wraps the coat around my shoulders, his warm fingers brushing over my collarbone. My neck hurts from arching it back to hold his gaze, but I can’t look away from those magnetic eyes, can’t focus on anything but the dark, heated promise within them… and my own helpless response.
“I won’t pressure you to do anything you don’t want,” he promises softly, and I believe him.
Swallowing my heart back into my chest, I let him button up my coat and lead me out to the car.
16
Marcus
Emma is quiet during the short ride to her place, her gaze trained on the streets outside the window and her luscious little butt positioned as far away from me as the car’s width allows. I let her be, though the temptation to touch her, to remind her of the scorching chemistry between us, is nearly impossible to resist. But resist it I do, because I promised not to pressure her into something she’s not ready for.
It’s bad enough I came on to her like a barbarian, all my hard-earned social graces decimated by a toxic mix of lust and confused anger.
I asked her on a date, and she paid for herself.
She paid for her own fucking pizza.
Even now, I can’t believe she did that—or that I let her. It’s just that she caught me off-guard, grabbing the check so quickly and with so little hesitation. Normally, when a woman offers to split the bill or pay for her own portion, it’s done more as a courtesy gesture, a nod to the modern times and the women’s liberation movement. It’s a woman’s way of showing that she doesn’t really need a man to pay for her, though, of course, she’s secretly quite pleased if he doesn’t accept her half-hearted offer and pays anyway.
At least that’s how it was when I was a student and didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Once I started earning real money, the half-hearted offers petered out, and by the time I made my first ten million, I forgot what it was like to have my dates play that game. Women now just assume that I will pay, both because I’m a man and because I’m filthy rich, and I don’t mind. It’s as it should be: if I’m with a woman, I take care of her.
Not with Emma, though. She didn’t make that assumption—nor did it feel like a game with her. She didn’t offer to pay; she simply did it, plopping down her cash before I could so much as look at the check. She was deadly earnest about it, too. It wasn’t a joke; for whatever reason, it mattered to her.
I take a calming breath and try to talk myself into looking away from her delicate profile. She’s still gazing out the window, her small hands clenched tightly in her lap and her curls wild and unruly around her freckled face. I don’t understand her, and I don’t understand my reaction to her. I want to reach over and scoop her up, to put her on my lap so I can feel the soft curve of her shapely ass against my groin. I want to tangle my fingers in that wild mane of hair and arch her head back, so I can kiss the pale white flesh of her throat, taste the pulse throbbing underneath that translucent-looking skin.
How have I not realized before how sexy petite, lushly curved women can be? When she was standing there, at the coat check, looking up at me with those startled gray eyes, it was all I could do not to bend down and grab her. To just lift her and carry her off like the delicious little prize she is. No other woman has ever elicited that urge in me—and certainly not Emmeline, with her sleek, elegant beauty.
I suck in another breath and finally succeed in dragging my gaze away from Emma. It’s pointless to compare the two women, because what I want from them is so different. Emma is a whim, an anomaly in a lifetime of self-discipline and rigid planning, while Emmeline is what I’ve always wanted, what I’ve worked toward since I was a little boy.
