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‘I can see you’re as quick-tempered as you ever were.’
She sent him a bland look. ‘Is that what you wanted to say?’
He barked out another laugh. ‘Point taken. I’ll get on with it. I sure wouldn’t want to bore you.’
One muscled thigh touched her hip and she shifted away from it, only to get trapped against the other one. Bored wasn’t the word that was first and foremost in her mind at the minute.
‘First off, you can shove your apology in one of those sweet places where the sun doesn’t shine.’
She sucked in a breath, shocked by his crudity. ‘That’s nice, I must—’
‘Hush, I’m still talking here.’
She shut her mouth.
Well, really. What had happened to those genteel manners?
‘Second of all. You might have been my first, but I wasn’t that much of a sap. You didn’t take me, I took you.’
Heat cascaded through her at the seductive growl, which made her even more aware of the muscled thigh pressing against her hip.
‘And thirdly, I screwed up my marriage all on my own, with no help from you.’
‘I fail to see how you can say that, when I seduced you two weeks before your wedding day,’ she argued, getting a little miffed at the lecturing tone. Where did he get off talking to her as if she were a two-year-old? ‘I knew you were engaged and yet I set out to seduce you, deliberately, without a thought to your fiancée or anything else.’
‘I believe I already covered that in point two,’ he remarked, his eyes brightening with amusement—which only caused her temper to sizzle alongside the heat. ‘You didn’t force me to do a damn thing I didn’t want to do. So you can quit getting your panties in a twist ten years after the fact.’
‘Oh, pur-lease,’ she hissed, struggling to keep the decibel level down in the face of his stubbornness. ‘Just because you now want to look at that night through testosterone-tinted glasses it doesn’t alter the fact that I put the moves on you, not the other way around. For goodness’ sake, I had to practically throw myself at you before you’d even so much as kiss me.’
‘So I was a slow starter. So what? I got the message eventually.’
‘I know you did, that’s not what I was trying to—’
His hands rode up to her waist, cutting off her protest in mid-sentence.
‘Excuse me? Do you mind?’ she yelped as those piercing blue eyes went from dark to dangerous and he leant forward to sniff at her hair.
‘Not at all.’
She shifted back, but he only grinned, obviously enjoying her skittishness.
‘You smell different,’ he murmured. ‘Did you change your shampoo?’
‘In ten years?’ she said, disarmed by the perceptive enquiry. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘I like it. More sophisticated but still sexy as sin.’
‘Right.’ She eased back, the pulse of arousal getting out of control. ‘I really have to go.’
His hands dropped, but then he reached up to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘No, you don’t.’ He patted the stool she had vacated. ‘Stick around. One more drink. Let’s talk. We never did get much of a chance to do that ten years ago.’
She should say no. Sitting next to him and sharing a companionable drink was a dangerous game to play while her erogenous zones were in meltdown. But when he shifted, his hand pressing into her waist to direct her to the stool next to him, and whispered: ‘What’s the matter, sugar? Scared you won’t be able to resist seducing me again?’ the tension snapped inside her and she laughed.
The statement should have sounded impossibly arrogant, but with that wicked light dancing in his eyes it sounded more like a challenge. And she’d never been able to resist one of those.
She gave him a deliberate once over, allowing her gaze to linger on the broad muscles of his chest and the sprinkle of chest hair revealed in the open neck of his shirt. ‘I’m sure I can manage if I put my mind to it.’
He let out a rough chuckle. ‘Touché.’ He sat back on his stool. ‘Take a seat. You know you want to.’
