was right at the center of this mess with Roark, and it really, really grated across my already taut nerves that even with no makeup on and looking like she hadn’t slept a wink, she was still the most gorgeous woman I had ever seen. I didn’t want to notice that. I didn’t want my dick to twitch when she touched me¸ but it did, which was going to make pretending to be infatuated with her easy and so much harder at the same time. She knew it too.
Prove it.
Okay. I would prove the shit out of the fact that I could do what I had to do in order to make this scheme of mine work. I could pretend to like her, which really was the only thing that would be fake. I couldn’t reconcile the way my pulse leaped every time she turned that midnight-blue gaze on me with the fact that she had orchestrated a man’s murder. She was beautiful but she was also deadly. She was just as hard as this place we came from, and I’d had enough of the city hammering against my foundation, as it was. Lusting after a woman who had it in her to be just as cold, and just as calculating, as any other criminal I locked up on a day-to-day basis was nowhere for my head to be while I was on the brink of war with her deranged ex-lover.
I was pissed off when I bent my head toward her. I was mad at myself. I was mad at her. More than all of that, though, I was furious that either one of us had to be in this situation in the first place. Every time I turned around, another bad thing or bad person was nipping at my heels. It was getting harder and harder to stay a step ahead. Eventually I was going to trip up and go down and there would be no one left with any kind of conscience in this place, no one left that cared about justice and righteousness.
That anger had my hands shaking as I reached up and used my thumbs to tilt her head back so her mouth was pointed up at me. I didn’t have much time to date, didn’t have the patience for a woman who didn’t understand that I was trying to save an entire city from itself and that my job took up most of my attention and energy. The women I did date were never the right height, or the perfect size, and they sure as hell never looked as luscious and as tempting as this woman did. No one had ever fit me the way she did and that pissed me off even more.
Everything about her was a test of my will. The way her dark eyes flashed when I lowered my head toward her parted lips. The way her hand trailed up my chest to curl around my neck as I got closer and closer. The way she breathed out a soft little sigh that tickled my mouth when I finally touched my lips to hers. It was supposed to prove a point. It was supposed to be an act of defiance, and maybe it was for a split second, but then it was nothing but a kiss and I forgot who she was and what it was supposed to be about. After that half a heartbeat I just wanted to kiss her and keep on kissing her until both of us were naked, and I was balls-deep inside of that perfect, traitorous body of hers.
Her mouth was soft, which was a lie because she was not a soft woman. She tasted sweet, which was also a lie. She might look like a dream and taste like dessert, but I knew there was a lot of tart underneath that pretty outer shell. Her tongue darted out and the very tip of it touched the center of my bottom lip, and before I could consider what I was doing, I was kissing her like I kissed a woman I wanted, not like a woman I was trying to resist.
I had my hands tangled up in her long hair and was using that leverage to back her against the flimsy door in the hotel room. She hit it with a little gasp of surprise and I took full advantage of the way her lips parted to dive right inside. I wanted to devour her. I wanted