Flirting With Disaster (Camelot 3)

“Because I try not to poach.”

“I’m not a pheasant,” she said, rather more vehemently than she’d intended. “Sean hasn’t bagged me.”

“If you say so, sexy.”

He really needed to stop calling her “sexy,” because they were not on television, and it was not 1978, and he did not have a mustache and a giant pelt of curly chest hair.

Or maybe she just needed to lighten up. It was harder than she’d expected to get into the spirit of things. It might have been different if she were still nineteen—if she’d never spent days at a time carrying her clothes on her back and peeing in the woods—but she’d lived the last decade in the real world, and it turned out her celebrity crush wasn’t translating as seamlessly into reality as she’d hoped.

Not that Judah wasn’t gorgeous, because he was. He was extraordinarily good-looking. But he wasn’t quite as big as she’d expected him to be, or as much. She’d thought he’d keep on being larger than life, but the more time she spent with him, the more he shrunk down, and now he was precisely life-sized. When he made heavy-lidded, smoldering eyes at her—the same smolder she’d loved on the cover of People—he looked more like a man who’d had three too many shots of tequila than one who wanted to jump her bones.

But still. Here she was. He was attractive, she was willing, sex was sex. She’d really liked sex once, and she had every intention of liking sex with Judah.

He lowered his head and nuzzled the exact same spot on her neck that Sean had rasped his face over earlier.

Nothing happened to her body in response. Nothing.

Katie decided to cut to the chase. She grabbed his head and tilted it up to lock her mouth over his.

He made a noise, satisfied and male, and kissed her back. His lips tasted like tequila and lime, which was excellent. She threaded her fingers into his hair.

He had such great hair. He’d showered before she came up here, and when he answered the door his hair had still been shiny-damp, gleaming under the track lights.

Come to think of it, wasn’t it still gleaming? It felt kind of stiff under her fingers, like he’d put something in it. Gel? Or one of those pomades her stylist was always trying to sell her?

Whatever it was, his hair looked fantastic, and it smelled good, too. Like hot sun and beach and … rosemary? Anise? She nibbled his lip and took a deep breath, wanting one more shot at classifying precisely what sort of delicious he was, and her nose wrinkled up.

Shit. She was going to—

She sneezed. Thank God, she got her hand up in time, but still, right in his face. How embarrassing.

“Sorry,” she said. “Can we try that again?”

Judah smiled, and she smiled right back at him. She couldn’t help it. He was so damned good-looking when he smiled. Smooth skin, amazing cheekbones, perfect lips … So what if his kiss didn’t set her loins aflame? So what? It was a totally adequate kiss. Totally adequate kisses led to totally adequate sex, which would be totally adequate to her purposes.

He kissed her again, and this time she opened her mouth to receive his tongue, ready for it to be wonderful.

His tongue was wet.

Everybody’s tongue was wet, though, right? And it had been a long time since she’d kissed somebody with tongue. A very long time. Maybe she’d forgotten how messy French kissing was. Once they got under way, she’d be more into it, and she wouldn’t notice the saliva-swapping aspect of this encounter quite so much.

Judah leaned into the kiss, pressing her into the couch. His nose pushed up against her nose, and she couldn’t figure out how she was supposed to carry on breathing and kissing him at the same time. She tried moving her head to one side, but he followed her, and then she tried the other side and that worked.

Right. Good. Now she could concentrate.

Katie closed her eyes and focused on the sensation of his hand stroking down her arm, closing over her breast.

And kneading.

She’d never been able to see the point of the kneading. Her breast was not a lump of dough. Having it mashed around did nothing for her.

She arched her back, hoping to encourage a little nipple play, but Judah didn’t take the hint. He just gave her more kneading, which, in combination with the thrusts of his overlarge, overwet tongue into her mouth and the fact that he’d pushed his nose against hers again, sort of made her want to smack him.

In fairness, it probably wasn’t his fault. Her sex life had become a sad, solitary thing, utterly reliant on her right hand and whatever hot moment she’d plucked out of the week’s erotic novel or soft-focus TV sex scene. What if she’d reconditioned herself to respond only to fictional sex?

It was a disturbing possibility, and one she had to consider, because here she was with the Sexiest Cock Alive in range, and she wasn’t feeling any zing.

Her junk was broken.