I deserved all those things.
He was sitting in that large armchair.
Shirtless.
Now, I’d had my experience with shirtless men. Handsome shirtless men. Not-so handsome shirtless men. Downright disgusting shirtless men. Most of those experiences involved a paycheck. And if it involved my pleasure, it was unfortunately a mixture of all three.
I didn’t always have the opportunity to pick men for pleasure.
But that was another story, one I had paid a lot of money to make sure no one knew.
Plus, Duke shirtless, in that chair, in this house was the only story.
Of course I’d known he was cut just by looking at him. And he was. He had a body that men in the business paid thousands for. A body that wasn’t from lifting weights or for impressing women. One that was for use.
But it wasn’t the body.
It was the marks on it.
The scars.
I usually sought perfection in men so I could pretend I was perfect too. People with scars and imperfections only reminded me of my own.
But Duke was beautiful. With all his pain. I liked that he wasn’t perfect. It made him not so terrifying.
He stood when I emerged from the bathroom, and just like I didn’t hide the fact I was checking him out, he didn’t hide it either. His gaze was physical, painful, from my head to my toes. It lingered on my boobs, where I knew my nipples were peeking out from the silk.
And not because it was cold in here.
He cleared his throat, met my eyes. There was still cold there. But there was something else. Hunger.
A hunger of my own crawled up from the most primal of places. A hunger I knew how to act better than anyone, but one I didn’t know how to feel.
We were attracted to each other. That much was obvious. That much, neither of us could hide. But you didn’t have to like or respect someone in order to be attracted to them.
I wished I didn’t like or respect this man.
Because then I’d have no qualms crossing the distance between us, pressing my expensive silk-clad body against his scarred skin and kissing him. The rest would sort itself out from there. He was a strong man, but he couldn’t say no to me. Just like if he did the same thing, I wouldn’t say no either. And I was an exceptionally strong woman.
But I did like and respect him, despite my best intentions. So anything that happened between us would be more than just sex. For me, at least.
For a long moment, that possibility danced between us. Crackled. So much so that my thighs clenched in anticipation.
“I’ll take the floor,” Duke said, breaking the moment, averting his eyes, and focusing on the area right above my head. He severed the moment brutally and quickly.
I glanced from the large, comfortable-looking bed to the wooden, definitely not comfortable-looking floor, then to the large, muscled and pissed-off man. I rolled my eyes. “I’m not a chaste Southern Belle, honey. As long as you don’t snore or wet the bed, I’m perfectly able to share a bed with you.”
I didn’t wait for him to agree or argue, I just walked to the bed, threw back the covers and crawled in.
In my mansion in Beverly Hills, along with my vacation homes around the world, I paid small fortunes to have the finest quality bedding in the world. The bedding royalty slept in. Presidents.
These were not the finest linens money could buy. They weren’t brand new. They were old. Not in a moth-eaten way, but in a different way. They smelled of laundry detergent and lavender. They were soft from all the times they’d been washed.
They were, quite simply, the finest sheets I’d ever felt.
I made a point not to look at Duke, hating that I didn’t have my phone. It hadn’t been so clear how much I’d used it as a shield, until I didn’t have it. Nor did I have the foresight to snatch up a book from the shelves on the other side of the room.
It would ruin the moment I’d created if I got up to grab one now. So instead, I acted like I was totally okay with lying in a bed that smelled of lavender, on a ranch in Montana, with a man who didn’t like me, pretending to his family I was his girlfriend, and not the witness to a high-profile murder he was trying to keep alive.
Duke stared at me a good long while. Maybe he was trying to see through the act, maybe trying to figure out whether the floor was a more sensible option.
I wasn’t sure what I hoped for more. I’d never slept with a man. I’d fucked plenty. But sleep was something personal. Intimate. Vulnerable. Something I never shared with anyone.
Not even the man I’d been engaged to. He said he couldn’t sleep with another person beside him, as it interrupted his dreams.