Rumor Has It

“Kate—”

“I’m not stupid, Griffin. Maybe a little inexperienced compared to you, but I know enough to understand that love is earned.”

There was that l-word again.

She took in his expression and made a sound that managed to perfectly convey what she thought of him. Which was that he wasn’t exactly love material anyway.

As he already knew.

“I told you,” she said. “All I wanted was a damn adventure. A fun, na**d one-night adventure. Why the hell can’t I have a damn fun, na**d, one-night adventure like everyone else?”

“Kate.”

“Am I that undesirable?” she demanded to know. She tipped her head back and let out a big sigh. “Tommy’s wearing a cape, and Ashley’s going to go postal on her BFF and ex-BF, and my dad’s probably going to accidentally burn his house down, so I can’t leave them and go to San Diego to dissect a calf, but I really thought I could at least have this.”

Was she speaking English?

“I’m Holly’s something blue today,” she murmured, “and I bet she doesn’t even know it.” Another heaved sigh as she turned to the window, head tilted up to stare out at the night sky. It was lit by a moon half covered in clouds. “That cloud weighs about two hundred thousand pounds,” she said. “Crazy, right?”

No. Crazy was standing in front of him in a bridesmaid dress with her hair now blowing around her face and her pretty eyes all glossy and troubled. Crazy was wanting to shove up her dress and then step between her spread legs and—

“It just really chaps my ass,” she said.

Yes, her ass. It was molded in that dress and perfect.

“I wore some great lingerie tonight, too,” she went on. “And I mean really great.”

This gave him pause.

“Almost slutty even,” she said.

Like a dog to a bone. He shifted closer, slid his hand up her back, and wrapped his fingers around the nape of her neck to turn her head to his. “How slutty?”

She shoved past him and headed to the door. “Oh no. Forget it. You missed your opportunity. Again. And you know what? I’m starting to doubt your man-’ho reputation. Because I’m having no luck getting you na**d.”

He followed the hot, pissed-off, sexy ball of fluff down the hall, deciding not to touch that statement with a ten-foot pole. “I’m driving you home,” he said.

“Not necessary.” She stepped outside and went still. “Dammit.”

Her dad had her car.

Grif came to a stop behind her. “I’ll drive you home,” he repeated. And he wouldn’t be getting out of the car to walk her in.

No possible way.

“This is really annoying,” she said. Her hair was a little out of control. Her dress was slipping off one shoulder, revealing a very narrow strap of something indeed pretty great and possibly slutty.

“So screwed,” he muttered to himself.

Kate crossed her arms over her chest and lifted her chin. “Nope. Screwing is completely off the table.”

Twelve

Fuming, Kate kept her face turned to Grif’s truck’s passenger-side window. The night was pitch-black as she gave the big, tall, far-too-sexy jerk in the driver’s seat her very best silent treatment.

Not that he seemed to notice. Nope, he drove with a quiet, steady calm, deep in his zone, which only served to fuel her temper even more. How did he lock it all away? How did he reveal nothing?

The answer to that slipped into her head, and she sighed. She knew how.

The hard way.

It had been drilled into him young and then further cemented by a life in the military, where feeling too much or allowing emotions to hit the surface could be deadly. It was dark in the interior of his truck, but she didn’t need a light to see the scar that ran along his temple and bisected his eyebrow.

Okay. So yeah, he had very good reasons to be stoic and sure of his every move. But she wasn’t a war zone. And she wasn’t his grumpy father. And she sure as hell wasn’t just any silly drunken bridesmaid. She was . . . more.

Or she’d wanted to be.

Grif still hadn’t spoken as he drove with single-minded purpose, sitting there in that tux, exuding testosterone with every slow, even exhale. She wished she knew what he was thinking. Maybe she’d know if she could get him out of that tux, strip him down to six feet plus of warm, smooth skin wrapped around hard muscle and sinew and bone . . .

But seriously. Who’d have thought he’d be so hard to get out of his clothes?

“You never answered my question,” he said, startling her.

“Which question?”

“Who did you think you were groping in that dark corner on the dance floor?”

Oh yeah. That question.

He slid her a look.

Dammit. He knew. “Ryan,” she said.

“Ryan has blond hair.”

“Like you said, it was dark.”

“Not that dark,” he said.

She shrugged.

“You back with him, then?”

“For someone who isn’t big on talking or communicating,” she said. “You’re sure doing a lot of it tonight.”

“Yes or no, Kate.”

She sighed. “No. I’m not back with Ryan.”

“So who’d you think it was?”

Her plan to ignore him was foiled when he slid her another look. It was all but impossible to ignore him when she was in the high beams of that steel gaze. “Fine!” she said. “I thought it was you, okay? But I don’t know why, since you’re a big, annoying, know-it-all, holier-than-thou alpha!”

“You mistook me for Anders,” he said, sounding much more insulted at this than her actual insult. “He’s like a foot shorter than me.”

“Not a foot. Maybe a few inches.”

“And he needs to get to the gym.”

“He’s fit.”

He made a disgruntled sound and pulled into the lot of her townhouse complex, right up to the walkway that led to her place, and left the truck running.

Coward.

As if he read her mind, his mouth twisted a little, and he reached out to cup her jaw. “If I come in, Kate, I’m going to have you na**d in three seconds flat.”

She started to take offense and then realized it was true. Yeah, he really was a damn coward. But she wasn’t. She might be nervous, but that was entirely different from being afraid, because being nervous wouldn’t hold her back from taking risks.

Griffin, on the other hand, was afraid of hurting her, and that would hold him back from the risk. But he couldn’t hurt her. She wouldn’t let him. “Thanks for the ride,” she said, which she absolutely didn’t mean. She did her best to make a dramatic exit, shoving the skirt of her dress aside, fumbling with the door.

But she couldn’t get it open.

It took her an embarrassingly long time to realize this was because it was locked. Glancing at Griffin over her shoulder, she blew a strand of hair out of her face. “When I said I needed fun, this wasn’t what I had in mind. Let me out.”

“No.”

“No?” Had she missed something? “Listen, just because you don’t want a piece of this”—she gestured to herself— “doesn’t mean that you can—”

“There’s a Lexus out front with a guy in it,” he said.

She blinked and peered down the street at the car he was looking at. “That’s Trevan’s Lexus,” she said. “He lives two buildings down.”

“He’s watching you.”

“He’s listening to music instead of going inside because his kids drive him crazy.”

Griffin got out of the car and came around for her, opening her door, walking her toward her townhouse. Not just walking her but clearly escorting her with his hand on her elbow, his sharp eyes scanning the horizon as if he was on guard.

At her door she tugged free. “Okay, I’m here safe and sound and social-orgasm free,” she said. “You can go now.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger for a moment, eyes squeezed shut, and she stared up at him, suddenly anxious. “Headache?”

“No,” he said. “You’re trying my patience.”

Oh, for God’s sake. She fumbled through her purse for her keys, shoved them into the door, and stepped over the threshold, reaching back to slam it shut.

Preferably on his nose.

Of course he stuck in his big foot in the door, pushed it open, stepped over the threshold, and then shut it.

And bolted it.

She felt a rush of heat that had nothing to do with temper. “You’re on the wrong side of the door,” she said.

He didn’t respond. Fine. She had things to do. He could be his big, silent, mysterious self all on his own. She kicked off her shoes—again. She dropped her purse and headed for the kitchen. She was thinking there were two men in her freezer who wouldn’t ever turn her down.

Ben. And Jerry.

Luckily, she had nearly a full quart, and she grabbed a spoon and leaned back against her counter.

Griffin followed her in, and the kitchen instantly shrank.

“Talk time,” he said.

“Sorry.” She dug into the ice cream. “Talking isn’t on my agenda tonight.”

* * *

Griffin watched Kate shovel in shocking amounts of ice cream. He wondered how that was going to mix with the alcohol, but she didn’t seem to be tipsy anymore.

She seemed to be pissed off.

He had plenty of experience with pissed-off women. His mom had been the first, and as a wild kid, he’d given her plenty of reasons. Then there’d been his sister and ditto. And then there’d been the women in his life. He’d been really good at pissing them off as well. “Look,” he said. “It’s not personal.”

“It feels personal. We discussed my panties.”

This gave him pause because the word panties from her mouth made him hard, and he couldn’t think when he was hard. “I’m positive that they’re really great,” he said carefully. “I’m also positive that you’re hot as hell and extremely desirable.”

She looked at him. “So . . . you do want me.”

“I do,” he said. “I want you all the f**king time, but—”

“Oh God,” she moaned. “There’s a but.” She sighed. “Go ahead,” she said, waving at him with the wooden spoon. “Give me the line.”

“What line?”

“Whatever line you were about to use to explain why we aren’t doing it,” she said. “Except don’t try to attribute it to you being a guy and this just being a sexual itch you can’t scratch. Although . . .” She considered him a minute. “Guys do peak at age seventeen, and you’re way past that, so maybe you can’t scratch it.” She licked the spoon, slowly, thoroughly, and completely upended his thought process.

“Did you just imply I’m past my prime?” he asked in disbelief.

She shrugged a pretty shoulder. “Just stating a fact.”

“Fact,” he repeated. “The fact is that you’re my baby sister’s best friend, and . . .” And Christ. She was setting down the ice cream, tossing the spoon into the sink, and . . . reaching behind her.

For her zipper.

She struggled a moment, and he stood there riveted on the spot.

“And?” she asked conversationally, finally getting her fingers on her zipper by reaching backward and over her head.

He heard the rasp as it came slowly down. “And,” he said. “And . . .” She was undoing him as effectively as she was undoing her dress. She was warm and soft, and she smelled amazing, and he found himself wanting to show her exactly what he felt like in the dark.

But then she turned and looked at him as she let her dress fall, her face politely curious.

The rest of her was in nude lace. A low, barely there bra, panties, and absolutely nothing else. He’d never in his life seen anything more erotically sexy. He had no idea what it was about her that made him want to howl at the moon. Maybe it was the way she had of making the world seem like a safe place—which he knew damn well it wasn’t. Or how she laughed at the little things, reminding him that there were still things to laugh at. Or hell, maybe it was simply that she always seemed just on the edge of disaster and still had a smile on her face.

He didn’t know, but he wanted to finish unwrapping her and then rewrap her—around him.

“You were saying something?” she asked in that same distant-but-polite tone.

“Yeah . . .” But he had nothing. He’d forgotten what he was going to say. He’d forgotten why he wasn’t going to do this. Because she was standing there, bared to him, braver than him, better than him, and she thought she was undesirable. He couldn’t let her think that, couldn’t bear to let her think that, he thought as he pulled her in against him. The feel of her heated skin, so soft, so smooth, all pressed up to him was heaven. “Kate.”

“Mm-hmm?”

“How drunk are you really?”

“Not even a little.”

“Swear it.”

“Swear.”

He stared into her clear eyes.

“Want me to walk a straight line?” she asked. “Sing the alphabet? I can burp it, too, but I need a soda for that.”

He fought a smile.

She didn’t fight hers at all, just let her lips curve sweetly. “Anything else?” she asked.

“Yeah. One thing.” He shifted a little closer so that they were sharing air. “If it had been me you’d found in the dark tonight on that dance floor, you’d have damn well known it.”