Take Me (Take Me 1)

“I don’t need an appointment,” he aggressively averred.

“I only have your best interest at heart, Jude. I—”

“You want to help me, Kate?” he demanded.

She whirled around to face him.

Jude’s three wide strides had him descending upon her. Kate shifted slightly, only to find her back was to the door. Jude leaned in close, bracing his forearm against the polished wood above her head. His body grazed hers, his chest brushing the soft material of her dress and her firm breasts. Every nerve ending sizzled and snapped.

He stared deep into her eyes.

“Take your dress off, Kate. Let me get you out of my system.”

2

Weeks later, Kate still couldn’t wipe Jude’s words from her mind.

Take your dress off.

It’d been a wraparound style. All he’d had to do was tug gently on the sash at her waist, slip the hidden button through its hole and…the front of the dress would have fallen open.

Rather, Kate had told him to back off. It’d taken all the willpower she’d possessed, because having Jude that close to her, inhaling his intoxicating cologne and the heat from his bare skin…feeling his warm breath on her temple and his chest against hers…

Jesus.

Her entire body had gone up in flames and her pulse had raged in her veins.

As his gaze had held hers and raw intensity exuded from his every pore, Kate had wanted nothing more than to experience him pressing his body to hers. So that she melted into him. So that he incinerated her from the inside out with all the scorching sensations he so easily incited.

But somehow she’d managed to find her voice. Her keen rationale. Her sensibility. She’d verbally kept Jude at arm’s length, even as he’d lingered for a few moments, the electric current arcing between them.

A knowing look in his dark and stormy eyes had told her he burned for her—and that he didn’t doubt for a second she felt the same.

He’d not known that before. Now, it was an inescapable reality.

But in Kate’s normal fashion, she’d quickly regained her bearings and had left his office with her shoulders squared and her chin hitched.

On the inside, however…

Good Lord.

She’d been this close to disintegrating into nothing but ash.

She’d always been fully aware of Jude’s potency. His virility. His powerful presence and strength. Everything about the man had drawn her in from the moment they’d met. He’d been wrecked emotionally, following a shattered engagement that resulted in an even more tragic ending. Broken physically, following an MMA fight, which he’d won, but not without taking a solid beating. Perhaps he’d even instigat

ed that beating. She knew Jude had signed on for the event not only in an effort to release some of the pain and angst boiling within him, due to Annalise’s horrific suicide, but also because he’d felt he deserved a good kick in the ass.

A grueling push-and-pull he lived with on a daily basis. Kate had believed with all her heart back then she could help him. She believed it to this day. Yet it wasn’t Jude who’d closed the door on their professional relationship this time. It’d been Kate.

After their encounter in his office, she’d had her assistant email Jude a short list of referrals for psychiatrists she highly recommended.

Jude hadn’t replied. Kate hadn’t heard from him since. But he was never far from her thoughts.

Nor was that brief, yet searing interlude that only left her craving to see all of Jude McMillan, stripped bare, every chiseled inch of him exposed, every sinful—

“Kathryn?”

Her gaze snapped up from the glass of Cristal she’d been absently staring into for God only knew how long.