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“You don’t have to explain yourself, Gretchen.” His voice was stiff and cold. “Spare me your excuses.”
“I’m not giving you excuses, you prickly jerk. I’m trying to tell you that if you don’t want to be with me, I understand. I’m not dumping you.”
He said nothing.
“Hunter!” she exclaimed, moving to his side and wrapping her arm around his waist. “I like you. I like you a lot. But I didn’t want to assume this was more than it was.”
“You let Cooper assume.”
“Cooper’s been my friend for years, and he’s my boss at the coffee shop I occasionally work at. I have to handle him with kid gloves, which isn’t easy when he’s trying to declare his love every five minutes. I’m not interested in him.”
Hunter’s dark eyes focused on her again, his gaze narrow and suspicious, as if he couldn’t quite believe what she was saying. “Answer me truthfully, Gretchen. Are you interested in me?”
“Now that’s a silly question,” she teased, tugging on his jacket sleeve. When he didn’t relax, she realized how deadly serious he was. No amount of teasing was going to ease this situation. And for a moment, Gretchen felt uneasy. Like she was stepping into raw territory. For some reason, it was very important that she not hurt Hunter. She didn’t want to hurt him more than anything. “I like you more than I should,” she admitted quietly. “Someone like you doesn’t really belong with someone like me, but I can’t seem to stop myself when I’m with you. I want to kiss you until you’re blushing, and grab your ass every time I walk past, and do dirty, lascivious things to you.”
The stiffness in his gaze receded a bit. He regarded her for a long moment, and then his hand tightened on her waist and he pulled her against him for a hard, breathless kiss.
“Someone like you is better than what someone like me deserves,” he said gruffly.
She frowned a bit at that—she’d been talking about money and station in life. But it was clear he couldn’t see past his face. “You shouldn’t talk like that.”
“I speak from experience, Gretchen. You’re the only woman who’s ever looked at me and not been revolted.”
Her hand caressed his scarred cheek, and she brushed her thumb over his lower lip. “Shall I show you just how un-revolted I am by you?”
He growled low in his throat. “You should.”
She glanced around at the empty kitchen, then grinned mischievously. “Does the door to this room lock?”
“No.”
She shrugged and began to slide backward onto the kitchen island. “Then you’d better hope Eldon doesn’t walk in on us.”
Chapter 9
“You’re never going to believe this.” Kat’s voice bubbled with excitement. “It’s wicked amazing.”
Gretchen cradled the phone to her ear and continued typing, logging her current letter. The month was creeping past entirely too fast and she was barely halfway through the enormous trunk of letters. She kept getting distracted by Hunter, though who could blame her? A sexy, delicious man who constantly wanted sex and gave her great orgasms? Every job should come with such distractions.
Still, she was behind in her work and it wasn’t going to get done unless she threw every free minute into it. “My landlord called you?”
“No. Though I did drop off that check. He was kind of pissy about it.”
“We got the payment in for the contract?”
“Better.”
“What’s better than getting paid?”
“You know Astronaut Bill number forty-two? Astronaut Bill and the Tragedy of Europa IV?”
&
nbsp; “That was the one with the rampant disease, right? Yeah, I hated that book.” Gretchen wrinkled her nose. “The cover sucked and they made me write in a plotline where Bill cheats on Uranea because he thought she was dead and they needed sex in at least three chapters.”
“It hit the New York Times Best Seller list.”
Gretchen dropped the phone in shock. She stared at her computer screen for a moment, then scrambled to pick up the phone, where she could hear her agent laughing with glee. “You’re joking.”
