him shirtless, and she imagined him that way now - that bronze swath of skin that stretched from neck to hips, the shallow valley of his spine, the play of muscles as he pulled himself up the cliff at the lower tip of the cove. "I'm too wound up for sleep."
He swung around. That laser gaze of his fixed on her face, and she felt herself going hot. Had he sensed her checking him out? She shot straight in her seat, yanking down the hem of her dress as far as it would go. Her gaze shifted aside and caught on her reflection in a mirror across the room. Her hair was tousled and wild. Remembering her conversation with Ian all over again, she touched the disordered waves.
"Why wasn't he honest with me back then?" she asked the woman in the glass as she yanked her fingers through the curling locks. "Tonight he didn't have trouble communicating this new hair wasn't to his taste. Why couldn't he have talked to me before humiliating me by fooling around behind my back?"
Griffin started back across the room, and she shifted to address him. He'd unfastened the top two buttons on his shirt, and her eyes stalled on the wedge of revealed skin. She cleared her throat and lifted her gaze to his face. "Couldn't he have said, 'Jane, it's been nice, but we're over'?"
When her companion didn't answer, a frisson of concern tickled her neck. She licked her lips and pressed farther into the cushions and then found herself talking again, as she always did when she was nervous. "Or he could have left a message on my phone." Her voice lowered, and she tried intoning in an Ian-serious imitation. "'Jane, I'm sorry, but it's time I move on.'"
A still-silent Griffin was standing over her now, the fierce expression on his face making him seem more pirate than that afternoon when she'd found him in eye patches and an earring. Her brain seemed to be stuck on babble. "Even a text would have - "
"Jane," Griffin interrupted, voice tight and matter-of-fact. "I'm sorry, but I'm having one of those inexplicable man-lust moments. Meaning if you don't get behind a locked door in the next seven seconds, I'm going to be all over you like coconut oil at a nudist colony."
At that, the heat in his gaze evaporated her thoughts. It seemed to evaporate the air too, because she went breathless as desire surged, then raced pell-mell through her bloodstream, flushing her skin like a fever. Ian Stone was cleared from her mind, his past betrayal suddenly wiped away by the big, tempting display of muscled male looming so close she could feel his sexual intent radiating outward to press against her skin.
She'd wanted to work off her temper, but now she couldn't remember what she'd been so mad about.
Other than Griffin.
Clearly, she was mad for him, she admitted to herself, because when he'd ordered her to be his party date, there'd been no other reason to agree. Oh, she'd told herself she'd gone along to support his interest in mingling with other writer types. That she wanted to witness him making professional progress. But that had been as good an excuse as any. Fact: she found him fascinating. Fact: despite all the reasons why she shouldn't be alone in a hotel room with him, she was. Fact: he'd been cold-hot-cold when it came to her, and it seemed as if he was running hot again.
Why not take advantage of that? She had those kinks she claimed she wanted to work out.
There was no need to get all uptight about their bubbling chemistry. It was merely the biological imperative to have sex, she told herself. Those irresistible feelings of desire that were near impossible to overcome or explain - so why overanalyze? She'd done research for an author once and learned why historically there were so many rules governing marriage - they were developed to constrain these primitive urges that all men and women experience from time to time.
But there were her own rules, Jane reminded herself. Griffin was her client, and Ian had been her client too, remember? That should prove why she shouldn't cross the line again.
But the devil on her shoulder whispered she'd learned her lesson about love. And Griffin wasn't Ian. Griffin wouldn't pretend pretty feelings he didn't have, and Griffin was so, so attractive, with his straight nose, his perfect high cheekbones, those eyes a fiery aqua-blue beneath