“One last thing.”
“What?”
“I want you to keep your distance from Pratt.”
“Caleb—”
“No, I’m serious. Sean, I need your help here. Keep the guy away from my sister. I don’t trust him not to take advantage.”
Katie pulled to a stop beside a pump, her blood boiling. There was overprotective, and then there was stifling. She loved Caleb and all, but she wasn’t about to let him smother her to death.
Sean had turned to look at her. He had the most astonishing eyes. Dark, dark blue, with thunderstorms in them.
She lifted her chin. “That isn’t necessary,” she told Caleb.
“I think it is.”
“No, it isn’t. If Judah wants to take advantage of me, I’m all for it.”
Sean blinked.
“Katie,” Caleb said, a note of warning in his voice.
“Stop. You don’t want to have this conversation any more than I do, so just drop it, okay?”
Sean got out of the car. Katie watched him go, uneasy but resolved. It was hard enough to defeat her own internal censor. She didn’t need two men dog-piling on to judge her ability to make decisions about her own freaking sex life.
Not that she had a sex life.
“Believe me, I would love to drop it,” Caleb said. “But I don’t think I can.”
“Try. I’m a grown woman. I have condoms. I think I’ve got this under control.”
Sean tapped on the passenger-side window and pointed toward the gas tank. Katie popped the fuel door for him, and he swept one open palm in the direction of the gasoline options. “The cheap stuff,” she said, loud enough for him to hear her through the window. He nodded and turned his back on her.
“I don’t imagine you care,” Caleb said carefully, “but I think your sleeping with Judah is a bad idea.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“It’s unethical.”
Now that was just unfair. Six months ago, Caleb had asked Katie if she thought it would be unethical for him to get involved with a client. She’d thought about it and told him no—that it depended on the situation, and in the situation he and Ellen had been in, it was fine.
She’d come to the same conclusion about this Judah job. It would be one thing if Judah were traumatized by fear, quaking in his boots and relying on Katie to keep him safe, but that just wasn’t the case. She was along for the ride. Why not make the ride a little more enjoyable—especially when Judah had made his interest in climbing aboard more than clear?
Maybe it wouldn’t be the smartest m
ove of her life, or the most romantic, but “romantic” wasn’t what Katie was looking for from Judah. If she had to pick one adjective to describe what she was looking for, it would be “torrid.”
Or “inadvisable.” She’d never had inadvisable sex before. She’d had Levi, the high school sweetheart who’d given her every single one of her firsts: first kiss, first sex, first orgasm, first wedding, first abandonment, first divorce.
Considering that Levi had walked out on her almost two years ago—two long, transformative, sexless years—and the ink had finally dried on her divorce papers a few weeks back, “torrid and inadvisable” sounded like just the ticket. Katie wanted to throw herself headlong into new experiences, skate the edge of recklessness, flirt with disaster.
All while behaving safely and responsibly, of course. No need to get Caleb’s panties in a twist.
Her brother was silent. He seemed to be waiting for a reply to a question she wasn’t sure she’d heard him ask. She tried out another “Mmm-hmm.”
“I didn’t even like the guy,” he said.