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Marisol silently chanted the mantra as Robert carried her across the hotel parking lot, but she might as well have been telling the sun not to shine or the wind not to blow.
She was already turned on. She’d been turned on since the moment she met Robert’s eyes across the bar. Having him throw her over his shoulder and tote her out of the saloon like a caveman dragging his woman back to his lair was enough to make her body hum, her panties wet, and all the defenses she’d worked so hard to shore up today threaten to crumble to pieces. One of two things was going to happen—she was either going to kiss him again, or she was going to expend a ridiculous amount of willpower tryingnotto kiss him, and become an emotional mess in the process.
She should have leapt at the chance to two-step with the pock-marked Count Dracula look-a-like and stayed at the bar. Better yet, she should have bolted out the back door the second she spotted Robert smoldering at her from across the room. But she hadn’t, and now there was no winning in her current situation, only lesser degrees of losing.
She’d drawn a hard line in the sand about keeping things professional, but kissing Robert would be a lot less mortifying than falling to pieces in his arms the way she nearly had last night. Kissing might lead to going to bed frustrated—she refused to take things further than a kiss, no matter how much she wanted to beg him to take her against the nearest wall—but it wouldn’t lead to getting emotionally involved.
Marisol could engage in a physical lapse of control and walk away with her head held high, but if she let Robert talk her out from behind her walls and into his arms, she wasn’t sure she’d ever want to leave. She would be lured in, coaxed to the edge of reason, maybe even fall in love. And when the day came that he pushed her away, the way everyone else in her life had, it just might kill her. She couldn’t go through that again, not even for a chance at something real with a man who was every naughty and nice fantasy she’d ever had rolled up into one delicious package. A kiss was risky, but a kiss would keep his mouth too busy to talk feelings, and in the current situation kissing definitely seemed like the lesser of two evils.
So when Robert stopped in front of the closed drugstore and flipped her back onto her feet, Marisol didn’t wait for the blood to finish rushing from her head before she reached up, captured his handsome face in her hands, and pulled his mouth down to her own.
Their lips connected with a thunderclap of shattered sexual tension heard round the world.
Marisol moaned as pleasure and relief coursed through her in equal measure. She’d been dying for another taste of him since their first kiss, and it felt like she’d been waiting a hell of a lot longer than two days for their second. She welcomed his fingers driving into her hair and his tongue spearing into her mouth with a shiver of pure delight. Resisting the urge to get physically closer to this man was a lesson in pain and frustration, and she knew tonight would end in more of the same. But for this one stolen moment, she had Robert as close as she wanted him, and she wasn’t going to waste a second of it.
Marisol twined her arms around his neck and arched into his body as his arm tightened around her waist. She met the firm, hungry strokes of his tongue with desperate swirls of her own, deepening the kiss until she could feel his teeth pressing against hers through their lips and her mouth began to feel bruised, but she still wanted more.
She wanted to forget all the reasons why she couldn’t let this go further than a kiss, to explore every inch of the perfect body she’d caught glimpses of as she fled Robert’s dressing room before a gig. She wanted to look up into his handsome face and watch his features shift as he slid inside of her, erasing the memory of every man before him because none of them had been the right man, the only one who could tempt her into breaking the promises she’d made when her world fell apart.
For two years, she’d stuck to her guns without a sign of weakening, but suddenly her promises didn’t seem strong or wise. They seemed like excuses to put off the scary business of getting up and moving on. Yes, she’d been hurt in heartbreaking ways by people who should have rallied around her, not thrown her out into the cold, but Robert wasn’t like Shane or her family. He would never hurt her.
She could feel it in the tender way he cupped her face in his hands, hear it in the way he whispered her name with a reverence that was humbling.
“Fuck, Marisol. Do you have any idea what you do to me?” He pulled in a ragged breath and tipped his forehead forward to rest against hers.
“I have a few ideas,” she said as she shifted her hips, trapping his rigid length between them, making his breath catch.
God, he was big, thick, and so delicious feeling she couldn’t resist the urge to rock against him, once, twice, until he groaned, a pained sound that made it clear he wanted her every bit as much as she wanted him. And she wanted himbad.Every nerve ending in her body was on fire and she was already aching after one long, steamy kiss. If she didn’t put an end to this soon, she and Robert weren’t going to stop until they were both naked and writhing together, chasing down the promise of bliss that thrummed in the air between them, forever crossing the line between business and pleasure.
“But we should stop,” she said, the right words emerging in a tone that begged for all the wrong things. “We work together, it isn’t a good idea to—”
“I don’t give a shit about good ideas. I want to work with you, and I want to be your friend, but I also want to make you come.”
Her breath rushed out. “Robert, I—”
“On my hands, on my mouth,” he said, sending a shudder through her, even before he added in a softer, deeper voice, “on my cock while you ride me. I know you want to, I could see it in your eyes when I walked into the bar.”
Her lips parted to deny it, but then his fingers tightened in the hair at the nape of her neck, and language was lost in a surge of primal need. Her eyes slid closed as desire coursed through her from head to toe, tightening her nipples, pulsing between her legs, drawing a submissive mewl of pleasure from her throat before she could try to stop it.
“I want to spank you and tease you and make you beg me to fuck you,” he continued in a whisper, his coarse words as much of a turn on as the feel of his other hand slipping down to cup her ass through her jeans. “But I don’t want to hurt you, and I’d put a fist through anyone who tried. You can trust me, Marisol. It’s okay to let me see who you really are, and what you really want.”
Marisol bit her lip and dug her fingertips into the thick muscles of his shoulders, trying to find the strength to put an end to this. But she couldn’t even open her eyes, let alone force her hands to his chest and shove him away. And when he brought his lips to her neck, dragging his teeth lightly over the sensitive skin there, the last of her will power went up in a puff of lust-colored smoke.
“One night,” she said in a rush of breath. “One night to get it out of our system, and then—”
“I don’t want one night. And I don’t want you out of my system.”
Marisol opened her eyes to find him staring down at her with an intensity that made her shiver. Gone was the sweet, empathetic Robert with the soft brown eyes. In his place was a man determined to get what he wanted. And he wanted her, body and soul. He wasn’t going to be satisfied with something purely physical, she knew that even before he added in a husky voice—
“I want every night.” His hand slid from her hair, smoothing down her spine in a slow, sensual caress. “I want to make love to you until you know there’s nothing to be afraid of. Not with me.”
A sliver of fear cut through the fog of lust, helping clear her head. “You can’t promise that,” she said, tongue slipping out to wet her suddenly dry lips. “We barely know each other, and I don’t—”
“I know you’re smart, talented, and kind, when you’re not trying to scare me away,” he said, arms tightening around her. “I know you make me laugh and challenge me to step up to the plate with my music, and that last night I couldn’t sleep because I kept thinking about what you said about the ugliness in the world, and wishing I was with you, showing you something different.”
Marisol swallowed hard, his sweet words only adding to the panicked feeling building in her chest. If she were a different person, with a different past, maybe his compliments would have melted the last of her resistance. But she was who she was. She was a woman who had learned the hard way that men could say all the right things and still betray you the moment you stood in the way of something they wanted.
She had bared herself completely to Shane. She’d been so exposed that there had been nowhere to hide when the blows started to fall. She’d crawled away from that relationship with her soul tattered and bleeding, and she hadn’t even been as drawn to Shane in the beginning as she was to Robert. Things with Shane had started with a spark that built to a bonfire. With Robert, she felt like she’d been thrust into the middle of a burning building and the fragile walls of her shelter were smoking all around her.
