“Don’t leer,” she snapped.
Jack looked away in his own good time. “Why not? You look good.”
“I look like a whore.”
Faster than lightning, he leaned across the cab and crowded her personal space. He smelled like midnight and elemental male. Like danger.
“You look available and willing. You don’t look for sale.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“Non, it is not.”
Jack said nothing more for long moments. He eased away and started the truck, then pulled away from the tree-lined street and took off into the dusk. Then they headed southeast, toward the heart of the bayou.
With another hot glance at her, Jack finally explained, “When a woman looks for sale, a man checks his wallet before looking twice. Available and willing just makes a man hot. Available and willing for him alone makes a man boil with need. Right now, I’m hard as hell.”
The night began closing around them finally, dark and absolute. Morgan swallowed. The way Jack looked at her through the inky closeness of the truck’s cab gave her pause. And if she was honest, made her wet. Did he realize that she’d never dressed this provocatively for any man, for any reason, before?
“If you were my woman,” he went on, his voice a sandpaper whisper, “you’d appear elegant in public. But in private…” He smiled, a flash of white teeth, illuminated by the moonlight drifting into the shadowed truck; it was a smile that promised satisfaction. “In private, I’d dress you in less than you’re wearing now. Much less. Without those useless lace panties you’re wearing.”
Morgan could barely catch her next breath. She didn’t want to dress like this. It had to look cheap and easy.
Yet she could not deny it also made her feel aware of her body, of her feminine power. Sexy and wanted and desired. How was that possible?
“You’re awfully direct.”
“I’m honest,” he admitted. “What’s the point of lying?”
“Oh, I don’t know. To be polite.”
Jack simply snorted.
“And these panties aren’t useless. They cover the essentials.”
“Exactly. Why would I want those covered?”
She gaped. “I’m not about to flash everyone in the first good breeze that comes along.”
“But if you were mine, what’s under that skirt would be mine, not yours, to show or conceal as I saw fit.”
His words burned her with shock—and terrible, unmistakable desire. She gasped.
“Shocked, cher? That’s what submission is all about. Surrendering control utterly to someone else. Your privacy, your body, your pleasure.”
He said nothing for long minutes, and Morgan lost herself in imagining. Would a dominant man really insist his partner show any—or all—of her body to anyone of his choosing? Anywhere? At any time? She squirmed in her seat at the thought. It was disturbing and exploitative. But some little part of her found his words reluctantly provocative. Forbidden. God, she’d gone insane.
But curiosity followed close behind. That, she allowed free rein. She was interviewing him about this very subject, after all. Journalistic integrity and all that.
“What you’re saying…it sounds selfish and mean-spirited, to expose someone without regard for their feelings.”
“It might look that way on the surface.”
“What do you mean, on the surface?”
“Like I told you online, one of the jobs of a good dominant is to see inside the soul of his submissive and grant her every pleasure she desires. Many submissives aren’t aware of their most secret desires.” He turned to face her, his chocolate eyes piercing, direct. “Or find them shameful, so they refuse to admit to them.”
He was talking to her. About her. With a hot glance, he made that clear. Her breathing shallowed, her heart beat accelerated. She couldn’t ignore the fact that her stomach—and her ni**les—went achy and tight.