“How did you find me?” she asked, her voice breathy. She looked more nervous now than when she’d feared he was a rapist.
He didn’t answer at first, merely letting the tension build as he unfastened another button. Then another. She never took her eyes off him and he’d swear her breathing picked up its pace as more and more of his body was revealed.
He’d been right. She hadn’t faked her responses last night. She’d wanted him. Badly. Which would definitely work to his advantage now.
“Did you really think you were going to be so hard to track down?” He could hear the tightly controlled anger in his own voice as the memory of what had happened between them last night returned full force.
He’d been totally focused on what she’d done, leaving him there naked and humiliated. Now he was remembering more. How she’d felt in his arms. How her lips had tasted. The way her hands had touched him.
He didn’t know whether to tear her clothes off and finish what they’d started or lock her in the closet for tormenting him so.
“I, uh, figured you’d leave the city this morning. As soon as you were able.”
He stepped closer. She stepped back. “You figured wrong. And by the way, your scheme didn’t exactly work.”
For the first time, she looked less nervous and more surprised. “It didn’t?”
Shaking his head, he quirked a half-smile, full of condescension but not amusement. “Your friend Tally spotted me. She quickly made sure the guests did not come out for their ‘toast’.”
He didn’t tell her about the amorous old innkeeper spying him, too. That would have given her too much satisfaction.
“So, all’s well that ends well,” she said with a nervous laugh. She tried to step around him. “Just a little joke and no harm done, right?”
He moved yet again, blocking her way with his body. Undoing the last button of the hideous shirt, he pushed it from his shoulders.
“Wh...what are you doing?” she asked. The lick of her lips and the shake in her voice indicated where her thoughts had gone.
To him. Undressing. In a bedroom. One night after they’d been so incredibly intimate in so many ways.
“Do you know how unpleasant it was to wear this disguise?” he asked. “I had to buy this shirt at a used clothing store.”
The shirt dropped to the floor. Her eyes dropped to his chest. His stomach.
When he reached for the fastening of the ugly old-man shorts, her eyes dropped again. “You can’t...”
“Can’t what? Can’t take off the ridiculous disguise I had to wear in order to get you alone again?”
Her stare never wavered as he unbuttoned the shorts. Unzipped the zipper. And dropped them to the floor.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered, reaching up to clutch her throat.
“Nothing you haven’t seen before, is it, Jade? Though, you didn’t stick around long enough to really see what you’d done to me last night.”
She could see now, though. Her whole face was flushed, her lips parted and wet as she stared at him. All of him, including the erection he wasn’t trying to hide.
He’d always assumed he was a normally built man. But the shocked hunger in her eyes told him he’d caught her off guard.
“I d-didn’t see you that well,” she stammered.
He kicked off the ugly shoes, then bent to peel off the socks. Then he rose, standing in front of her, completely naked. Uncaring, not bothering to even pretend to be considerate.
She looked like she wanted to run. She looked like she wanted to jump on him. She looked like she needed someone to tell her what to do.
So he did.
“Take off your dress and get into the bed, Jade.”
