Noah didn’t look all that surprised. He must have figured it out from the context.
She wondered if he’d guessed what she was going to do next.
“Do you find me attractive, Noah?”
“Sure.”
“Sure? You don’t sound sure.”
“With respect, I’d have to be a dead man not to.”
“Do you have any moral objection to casual sex?”
She’d hoped for a gasp or an open mouth, a fish-catching-flies expression, but Noah didn’t react at all except for between his eyebrows, where twin frown lines sank deep. Impressively deep. Two or three centimeters. If she still had the ruler she’d used to familiarize herself with metric measurements in middle school, she cou
ld confirm.
“Not on principle,” he said carefully.
“Do you object, on principle or in practice, to the idea of taking me to the nearest motel and fucking me?”
What followed was the longest ten-second silence of her life. In the parking lot, a diesel engine roared to life, and Noah’s delicious, soft brown eyes flicked to the door, then back to her face.
Down to her breasts. And below.
It was a good view. She made sure of that.
Carmen waited for something to happen. The anticipation should have been delicious, but it didn’t feel right. Her eyes fixed on Noah’s impractical giant belt buckle. “Sisters Rodeo,” it said. “70th Annual.”
She tried to imagine this man on a horse and failed utterly.
“Noah?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“The offer’s on the table. Take it or leave it.”
“You’re not kidding,” he said.
When she just raised an eyebrow, he reached for her.
She wasn’t sure what he’d intended. A quick grope—that would be the obvious thing. But those lines were still deep between his eyebrows, and he looked … concerned. As though he could see right through her to the earthquake, to the hurt, and Carmen didn’t want that.
She pushed his hand away. Her heart went into overdrive, and she almost called it off. The words formed on her lips. Forget it. Just forget I said anything.
Only she found, when she looked down, that she hadn’t actually let go of his hand. And he used that weakness, turned it on her somehow. He pivoted his own hand at the wrist, clasped her palm, released it before she’d even registered what he was doing, and then he was sliding his fingers over the sleeve of her suit jacket, up toward her elbow. He was reeling her into his body, inch by inch, so she had to tilt her chin up. Way up.
Then it was hard to feel like she had all the power in this situation. Because of the crick in her neck. And the wound in her pride.
Because she couldn’t stop thinking, Kiss me. God, please, kiss me.
“Not here,” she told him sternly. “Follow me.”
He looked at her face, an unauthorized X-ray of every decision she’d made before she left the house this morning. The white suit because it made her look untouchable. Her hair down because she had beautiful hair, hair that made men pay attention to the way she looked instead of the way she got what she wanted.
Bare legs and tall red shoes because she loved the way they clicked against the sidewalk when she walked, and she loved that she’d taught herself to walk in them with a Cuban girl’s sway in her step.
He touched the freckle at the corner of her eye with his fingertip. Unnaturally calm.