Badd Kitty Read online

  “So will you go back to it?” I asked.

  He shook his head and shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. He wasn’t the first jumper to die in the line of duty, and not even the first I’d worked with. But his death just hit me hard, and I’m not sure if I can or if I even want to go back to fighting fires. I miss it, don’t get me wrong. I miss the challenge, the rush, the intensity. I loved the work, but I’m just not sure at the moment.”

  “So you’re still dealing with that? The loss of your friend?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I mean, of course. You don’t just get over something like that—losing a best friend. Not quickly, maybe not ever. I mean, I’m okay, I’m not stuck in grief or anything. I miss him, I’m sad, I’m grieving his loss, but I also know I have to move on with life. He’d kick my ass if I wallowed around wasting my time mourning him or whatever. But yeah, it’s a loss I’ll be dealing with for a while.” He laughed, scrubbing his jaw. “So there’s the story. Anything else you want to know?”

  I gazed up at him, resting a hand on his shoulder. “Thank you for sharing that with me, Roman.”

  He turned to face me. “You have to know I don’t talk about shit like that with most people, right?”

  “So I should be honored?”

  He nodded, no humor in his eyes. “Yeah, you should. With most women, we don’t talk about personal shit.”

  “You don’t do much talking at all, I’m guessing.”

  “You’d guess right.”

  I pushed that aside, and focused on him. “Just so you know, this, what we’re doing? Talking? Getting to know each other? This is part of emotional connectivity—you being vulnerable with me, letting me see more of you besides the big, macho, dirty-talking sex cowboy.”

  “Sex cowboy?” he asked, laughing.

  I slapped his chest. “Shut up. You know what I mean.”

  He laughed harder. “No, I really don’t.” He stood in front of me, towering over me, one hand on the railing beside me, the other clutching his now-empty wineglass. “What’s a sex cowboy, Kitty?”

  “You, I guess.” I let my hand rest on his chest, feeling the hard, heavy muscle. “The way you are about it.”

  “How am I about it?”

  I shrugged, finding it hard to breathe with the intensity and heat of his presence, his body. “Rough, domineering, approaching it like a game. Like something to win.”

  “You like that, though.” He took my empty glass from me and held them both in one hand, leaving my hands free; I rested them on his chest, let them slide around a bit, beginning an exploration of his muscular torso.

  “I don’t know that I do,” I argued.

  “It’s new to you. It’s unfamiliar, so you’re unsure. You’re out of your element.” He let his gaze wander downward for the first time in a while, soaking up the expanse of my cleavage before returning his eyes to mine. “You don’t want to like it, but you do.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because of the way you responded to me.” He grinned at me. “You responded to my touch like you’d never felt anything like it before. You wanted more. You couldn’t get enough, until you stopped. Your mind, your heart—those weren’t exactly along for the ride, but your body was.”

  “That’s part of what’s hard for me,” I said, pushing the edges of his suit coat aside to explore more of his shoulders and chest with my hands. “Having my heart and head at odds with my body is weird, and I don’t like it.”

  “Can’t you just go along with what your body wants?”

  “Spoken like a man,” I laughed, shaking my head. “No, Roman, I can’t. I’m not wired that way. I’m a woman, which means—for me at least, although I know everyone is different—it means that I need some kind of emotional connection for sex to be meaningful. Sex and emotions are hardwired together, to me. For me to really get into it, my head, heart, and body have to be aligned.”

  “You seemed plenty into it,” he shot back, smirking.

  “It was an overwhelming experience,” I admitted. “And you make it hard for me to think straight when you turn on your whole charm-and-seduce routine.”

  “It’s not a routine,” he protested.

  “Yes it is. It’s how you get women to sleep with you.”

  He frowned. “Hmmm. I mean, I see what you’re saying, but I don’t like calling it a routine, like it’s a formulated process.”

  “It’s not?”

  He shook his head. “No. It’s not like I do the same thing every time—that’d be disingenuous and any woman I was trying it on would see right through it.”

  “Then how do you do it?”

  “It’s about observation, noticing responses, reading body language and reactions.” He leaned close to me, towering, huge, hard, and I sucked in a breath. “See? Like this. When I get this close to you, you react. You breathe in and hold your breath. Your nostrils flare. Your eyes widen. To me, that means you like me being close, you’re reacting physically just to my proximity. It means if do something like this—” He trailed a fingertip down the outside of my arm, around to my front where the plunging neckline left my skin bare, dragging his finger up the center of my body in a fiery, tingling line. “You’ll react even more strongly. You’re shivering, clenching your jaw, breathing deeply—you like the way my touch feels. But you’re nervous, because you don’t know what I’ll do next.”

  “You’re very observant,” I said.

  “Yes, I am.” He shuffled closer yet, so our bodies were almost touching. “See, you can call it my charm-and-seduce routine all you want, but I just call it doing what comes naturally to me—turning you on. Making you feel—sensations, rather than emotions.”

  “What if I want to feel emotions as well as sensations?”

  “I wouldn’t even know how to go about that. What am I supposed to make you feel?”

  “I don’t know—something besides raw lust?”

  “What’s wrong with lust?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing in itself. There’s just…there has to be more to sex than lust.”

  “Like what?” he asked.

  I sighed, trying to formulate my thoughts into words; in thinking it through, I found myself sliding his suit coat off his shoulders. He took it from me, folded it, and tossed it onto the nearby couch. I wanted still more of him, of feeling his body and his massive physique, so I held his tie in place and tugged the knot free, stuffed it into his hip pocket, and then unbuttoned his shirt, untucking it. I bit my lip at the swell of his muscles against the white undershirt, wanting still more. The cuffs, then—I freed his wrists from the prison of the buttoned cuffs, and pulled the shirt off of him. Python-thick biceps stretched the sleeves of the T-shirt, and his chest strained against the cotton, hanging free around his trim waist. I met his ice-blue eyes as I tugged the hem free from the waist of his suit trousers; he only reached up, one gentle thumb prying my lip out of my teeth. I wanted to see his body—his bare skin, the muscles, the curve and line and hardness of him. He lifted his arms over his head, and I peeled the undershirt off him, tossing it onto the couch with his button-down and suit coat. He was naked from the waist up, now…

  And utterly magnificent. Glorious. A living god made flesh—every inch of him was sculpted to perfection, enormous muscles rounded and hard and taut, bulging with power. His abdomen was a rippling field of shredded muscle, his chest a broad swelling colossus of strength, his arms cables of rigid steel wrapped in tanned flesh.

  “God, you’re gorgeous,” I breathed, the words torn from my lips.

  His answer was to set the glasses on the table and return to stand in front of me, blue eyes burning. “You didn’t answer my question,” he murmured. “What else is there to sex besides lust?”

  “Besides the obvious?” I asked.

  He frowned down at me, seemingly perplexed. “What’s the obvious?”

  I laughed, shaking my head. “Love!”

  He tensed. “Love.”

  I nodded, biting my lip—int
entionally, this time, hoping to elicit a reaction from him. “Yes, Roman, love.”

  He tried to back away, but I hooked my fingers into his belt loops and held him in place.

  Roman blinked down at me, a palpable wall going up behind his eyes—one which I was starting to understand the source of. “If that’s what you’re hoping to get from me, I’m afraid you’ll end up disappointed.”

  I wasn’t bothered by his response. I just smiled at him, tracing a finger over the bulge of pectoral muscles. “I’m not so sure.”

  “How about besides the obvious, then?” he said, in an obvious gamble to change the subject.

  “A lot of things,” I answered, running my palms over the mountain ranges of his shoulders, down to the valley between his pecs, over the ridges and runnels of his abs. “Respect. Affection. Intimacy. Selflessness—meaning, the desire to give of yourself to the other person without needing anything in return. Vulnerability. Trust. Safety. Protection. And yes, protection for you, too, Roman. Men are protectors, and I get that—but men need protection, too.”

  “From what?” he asked, his voice pitched low, rife with hesitancy and suspicion.

  “You men act tough and hard and impenetrable, and with you, I sometimes think you really are that way. But then I get glimpses of the man under all that armor, and I see a man who has mommy issues, and relationship issues, and intimacy issues—a man who’s never let anyone in except his brothers. Your emotions are deep down, but they’re there, and they’re fragile, and tender, and delicate. Assuming you could be truly vulnerable with me, you’d need me to protect those emotions, Roman.” I gazed up at him, letting him see my emotions in my eyes—my desire, my nerves, my doubt, my hope. “And I could do that, if you let me.”

  “Fragile, tender, and delicate, huh?”

  “And that’s a good thing,” I said. “You can’t be tough and hard and strong all the time.”

  “Yes, I can.” He tapped his chest with a fist. “That’s how I’ve always lived.”

  “Which is why you don’t understand how to do emotions with sex.”

  “And you’ve never had sex without the emotions.”

  “So we both have something to learn.”

  “And you think you could teach it to me, do you?” He sounded skeptical, which would have been insulting had I not seen past it.

  “I’m willing to try. And I’m willing to learn, too.” I stared steadily up at him. “Are you?”

  “Is that the bargain you’re driving, Kitty?”

  I shook my head. “No, not at all. There’s no bargain.” I decided on brutal honesty. “You want the truth?”

  He nodded. “Absolutely.”

  “I want you. I want this with you.” I palmed his chest on the emphasized word, knowing he’d understand my meaning. “You make me feel things I’ve never felt, in ways I’ve never thought possible. And I want more of it. And yes, Roman, I plan to take this as far as it can go with you—tonight. Now.” I held his gaze, caressing his chest and arms as I spoke. “But you have to understand something, Roman—I can’t do this without emotions. It’s not how I work, as a person. So I’m going to sleep with you, and I’m going to try to learn from you how to let go, how to just feel, just be, like you were saying. But I’m also going to feel things for you, emotionally. I’ll probably get invested in you, in the idea of us. I’ll end up wanting that—wanting more from you than just sex. I already do, to be totally honest. Which scares the bejesus out of me, because I know darn well you’re not that kind of man.”

  “Kitty—”

  “You’re an asshole, Roman Badd. The things you say, the things you do, most of them are just selfish and self-centered. I was half-convinced, until today, that you had few, if any, redeeming qualities aside from your looks and sex appeal. And yes, as you’ve pointed out, and as I’ve already admitted, I want you, and I don’t want to want you. I don’t want to feel the things I’m feeling for you. But then you do something like this,” I gesture at the boat, the saloon, the wine, “and you surprise me. You do something like this that makes me think there’s a really great guy in there, trapped somewhere deep inside, especially in the way you’ve opened up with me a little this evening. I’m not naive enough to think I can bring that guy out of you by myself. You’d have to want to do that for yourself. But I can’t help wanting you, wanting the things you can give me, sexually. So I’m giving in to that and letting myself hope a little, but not too much. I’ll probably end up getting hurt, and I’m going into this knowing that full well. But I have good friends who will be there for me when it’s all over, and I know I’m strong enough to be willing to at least try, despite what I suspect the results will be.”

  I continued to hold his gaze.

  “Can you say the same?” I asked the question with my eyes on his, my heart on my sleeve, everything laid out for him.

  He seemed rocked to the core. “Not how I expected this to go.”

  “Thought you’d make a romantic gesture, sweep me off my feet, seduce me, and go along your merry way, huh?”

  He shook his head. “No, actually. Typically, yes—that’s exactly what I’d expect. But I’ve never made a gesture like this for anyone. I’ve never cared enough to put the effort in. But I do care, Kitty.” He ground his jaw, thinking, formulating. “You saying you weren’t sure I had any redeeming qualities kind of hurts, if I’m being honest. I know I’m an asshole, but I did kind of think I had something to offer besides big muscles and being good at sex.”

  “You haven’t offered me anything besides that, Roman,” I said. “Until now.”

  “I wouldn’t have set this whole date up if I wasn’t trying to offer you more.” He held my gaze, but his eyes were conflicted, deeply thoughtful. “If all I wanted was sex, I’d have gotten it. If I wanted to fuck you, I could have gotten that from you already, and you know it. You’d have given it to me willingly—you’d have resented me afterward, probably, but we’d have fucked.”

  I frowned up at him. “And then you say something like that and I wonder about you all over again.”

  “I can read your physical responses like a book, Kitty. I know you want me, physically. You want my hands on you; you want my mouth on you. You want me inside you, all over you, everywhere.” He breathed this, inches from my face, his breath hot, his words hotter. “It would have been so easy, too.”

  His hands brushed over my cheeks, tilting my face up—I was helpless to want anything except the kiss his touch promised. I parted my lips, but instead of kissing them, he ran his thumb over my lower lip; with a subtle tilt, his thumb pressed against my mouth, and I tasted the salt of his skin, felt the rough callus. Instinctively, I closed my lips around his thumb and he drew it out slowly, tasting him on my lips and over my tongue, an erotic glide of flesh on flesh. A tease—a taste of him, of us.

  He rumbled a laugh. “See? See how easy it would have been?”

  “But?” I questioned, my lips moving against the pad of his thumb, my eyes tilted up to his.

  “But I wanted to…to deserve more from you.” He clenched and released his jaw several times before continuing. “I couldn’t deny that I wanted something more with you than just to fuck and be done.”

  I sucked in a breath. “So you do want more?”

  He nodded, the movement slow and heavy. “Yes, I do. I just—I don’t mind admitting I have not the slightest fucking clue what that looks like, or how to do it.”

  “Just be honest. Be open. Be vulnerable.”

  “What does that mean, though?” he asked. “You keep telling me to be vulnerable, but what does that look like?”

  I caressed his shoulders, down his chest, ran my hands down to his waist, around his sides, up his back, and then clung to him, my fingers dimpling the powerful muscles of his back, just beneath his shoulder blades. “It means letting me see parts of you that aren’t strong and in control and tough. It means not having to be the big, swaggering, balls of brass macho man all the time.”

  “I’
ll never be some sissy, touchy-feely sap, Kitty. Just not who I am.”

  “I’m not asking you to be, Roman.” I gritted my teeth and admitted a truth I’d been hiding from until then. “Honestly, I like the way you are. You frustrate me, and your bluster and bravado can be infuriating, and your arrogance can be off-putting, but at the same time, it’s part of your charm and what makes you so attractive. All I’m saying is, it’s okay if there’s more than that—if only with me.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “That’s all I’m asking.”

  His blue eyes searched mine, intent, focused, and open for once. “You’re asking me to try?”

  I nodded. “I am.”

  “What is it we’re trying?”

  “Sex with emotions. Sex where you don’t run away afterward. Where there’s more than just sex.”

  “To be clear: you want sex regardless, but you’d rather it be more.”

  I shook my head. “No, that’s not what I’m saying.”

  “Then I’m confused, ’cause that’s what it sounded like.”

  I rested my chin on his chest and gazed up at him. “What I’m saying is, yes I want sex with you regardless of the emotional component. But I don’t just want it to be more than just sex—I need it to be more. I’m just willing to accept the consequences of sleeping with you even if you can’t give me more.”

  His smirk was the arrogant half-smile that sent frissons of infuriated arousal through me. “Then you must really want to fuck me.”

  “Must you be so crude?” I asked, eyes narrowing up at him.

  “Sorry, princess, let me rephrase—you must really want to ride my cock.”