Sleepless in Manhattan (From Manhattan with Love 1)

She closed it with herself on the inside.

Heat spread across the back of his neck.

He was doomed.

“I’m busy right now, and—”

“Then I’ll make it quick. I want to talk about what happened.”

He hedged. “Talk about what exactly?”

“The kiss.” She walked toward his desk, and something in the sway of her hips made his mouth dry.

He could remember the taste of her, the soft lick of her tongue against his, the rapid beat of her pulse under his fingers.

“You were scared. I was trying to distract you.”

“Which part was supposed to distract me? The part when you had your tongue in my mouth or the part when you had your hand up my skirt?”

Her words took him straight back there.

If she’d been anyone else, he would have hauled her straight back to his apartment and screwed her until neither of them had the energy to leave the bed.

But instead, here he was, trying to do the decent thing and she was making him feel bad about it.

The injustice of it made him irritable.

He pushed back from the desk. “You were hyperventilating.”

“You kissed me to stop me overbreathing?”

It sounded ridiculous even to him. “You were scared and I comforted you. That’s what it was about. Don’t make something of it, Paige.”

“Don’t make something of it?” She paced to the desk on those crazily long legs that had been wrapped around his waist the night before.

Restless, he shifted his gaze from her legs to her mouth. That didn’t help, because her mouth was soft and glossy and he knew exactly how it tasted. The truth was there wasn’t a single part of her that didn’t tempt him. He tried staring at his computer screen. “Yeah, you know—don’t spin things.”

“Things?”

He ground his teeth. “Fairy tales. That’s Eva’s domain.”

“And what are you in this fairy tale, Jake? Prince Charming? Because I don’t remember being asleep. The big bad wolf? All the better to eat you with?”

“It was a kiss, dammit.” He stood up, irritable, cornered. Dragging his fingers through his hair, he looked at her. “What do you want me to say? I kissed you.”

“I know you kissed me. I was there. What I don’t know is why. And don’t tell me you were trying to stop me hyperventilating.”

Why had he kissed her?

Because for a few seconds he’d let his guard drop. “You were upset.”

“You don’t kiss women when they’re upset. You hug them. You pat them. You say ‘there, there.’”

“It started that way.” Why the hell couldn’t she let it alone?

“But it didn’t end that way.”

“No, it didn’t.” The memory of how it had ended had kept him awake for most of the night. He’d paced the considerable length of his loft apartment several times. He’d taken two cold showers. “Do you always analyze everything?”