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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.”
