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And it would be nice to have a date for her sister’s co-ed wedding shower. Even better, maybe having Luke on her arm would make Bradley finally sit up and take notice.
Luke was pushing buttons on the security system keypad next to the back door, frowning at it and shaking his head. “This is a piece of junk. I’ll bring over a new system later.” He glanced at his watch. “But right now I’ve got another meeting to go to.”
“Are you going to the wedding shower tomorrow night?” she asked.
“I haven’t come up with any good excuse not to, so you want to go together?”
Jane nodded, sealing the deal. She would prove her theories about sex, maybe even get enough fodder for another book. Luke Nicoletti didn’t stand a chance.
LUKE COULD USUALLY give himself credit for thinking before he spoke. So there was no explanation for his idiotic proposal to Jane Langston, other than that he was letting the wrong head do the thinking.
But now he’d done it, and a perverse part of him wouldn’t even consider the idea of backing out. He could still turn down her case, avoid her completely, even back out of being a groomsman in his cousin’s wedding. Yet he didn’t have the slightest intention of doing so. He couldn’t wait to get to know what made Jane tick, what had given her such wacko ideas about sex, and what he could do to change her mind.
Oh yeah, he fully intended to prove her wrong—it was the least he could do for mankind.
Luke glanced down at the clock on his dash as he turned onto Jane’s street. Ten in the morning, and he hadn’t told Jane he would be stopping by. He intended to do a little reconnaissance, get a feel for the rhythm of the neighborhood, see what Jane’s daily activity patterns were. Truth be told, he was hoping to catch her going out, so he could follow and see just how aware she was of potential dangers.
He parked on the street, two town houses down from hers, and killed the engine. The neighborhood was quiet, other than one guy mowing the grass half a block down. There was no activity at Jane’s place. Curtains were still drawn, and her car was in the driveway.
Luke had bought Jane’s book, The Sex Factor, last night on the way home. He picked it up from the passenger seat and turned it over to the back cover. There was a black-and-white photo of Jane, her hair a wild mane of curls spilling over her shoulders, her smile slightly ironic. He flipped the book back over to the front and turned to the page where he’d left off the night before, in the middle of the first chapter, entitled “Why Sex is Ruining Your Relationships.”
He figured if he was going to prove Jane wrong, he at least needed some hard facts about her faulty philosophy. So far, he’d learned that she gave men very little credit, assumed they were all good-time Lotharios and claimed they were incapable of thinking rationally where sex was concerned.
Okay, so he hadn’t exactly been a model male yesterday in her presence, but for the most part he wasn’t the kind of guy she described.
Luke read the next few pages of the book, glancing up every twenty seconds or so to see if anything had changed in the neighborhood. Other than occasional passing cars, nothing new happened until he’d been sitting for a little over a half hour. He was right in the middle of a paragraph that had his blood boiling—a load of garbage about how a man automatically considers a woman his conquest once she’s slept with him—when he spotted some movement out of the corner of his eye.
Jane’s front door opened, and she came out clad in jogging shorts and a T-shirt, her hair pulled back in a ponytail.
Jackpot.
She trotted down the front steps and did a few stretching exercises, giving Luke a chance to admire the shape of her legs, the little hint of her hips he could catch when she bent over, the curve of her breasts against the T. Damned if his body temperature didn’t go up a few degrees. She was a delicious combination of soft and firm, with lush curves that she probably tried to tame through frequent jogging. The result was a sort of soft, feminine athletic look that gave Luke an instant hard-on.
He needed to keep his mind on the job, but something about Jane kept his thoughts wandering into the bedroom whenever he wasn’t on guard.
He’d made sure to wear jogging clothes himself, since they were versatile and offered him a cover, too, in case anyone wondered why he was lurking about the neighborhood. They also allowed him to follow her on foot with no problems, and his running hat gave him a bit of a disguise. First though, he planned to follow by car, just to see if she could catch him at it.
She started down the street in the opposite direction of his car, her strides long and her ponytail bouncing.
