Entice - By Ella Frank Page 0,52

air she’d had about her only five minutes earlier.

Mutley took the opportunity to run around the truck, heading over to the stranger. Josh watched as her father bent down, his hand reaching out to ruffle over the dog’s head. Mutley, of course, licked his hand and wagged his tail. With a smile, Josh noticed Shelly was discreetly taking a step away from the dog, still not quite comfortable with him.

Josh found himself grinning until her father stood and turned to look at him.

As their eyes locked, Josh felt the other man assess him straight away. Shrewd eyes took in the truck first, then they moved back to him, looking over the T-shirt and jeans, and then he turned back to the dog and his daughter.

Josh was left wondering if he had passed or failed. Well, I’m about to find out, he thought. With a pinched expression, the man made his way over to Josh with the dog trotting along one side and his daughter on the other. Stopping when they reached Josh, her father held out his hand.

“Hello. I’m Dr. Lawrence Monroe.”

Oh shit, Josh thought as he looked to Shelly. Her father is a doctor, too?

He wondered if that had anything to do with the cool relationship between the two of them.

Josh reached out, taking his hand in a firm clasp, and shook it. He had to look up at the man and found himself caught in a kind of stare down.

Josh had promised himself he would not be intimidated. After all, he was successful and owned his own company, not that Shelly knew that. Overall, he was a good guy.

A good guy who wants to sleep with this man’s daughter. So?

“Nice to meet you, sir. I’m Joshua Daniels.”

Since when did I start calling people sir and ma’am? When I entered the South?Who knows?

“Yes, so my daughter was just tellin’ me.” He paused, and then turned to look at Shelly, effectively dismissing him. “Dinner will be served at 7:30.”

Shelly nodded. “We’ll be there.”

He looked his daughter over again, and then turned back to Josh, looking him over, too. “Cleaned up, I presume?”

“Of course,” Shelly muttered.

Josh watched as her father walked up the stairs and into the house where Shelly’s mother had disappeared to earlier.

Shelly turned to face him, giving him a smile so painfully false that it almost looked as though it hurt her face.

“And that is my father.”

***

With Josh’s help, Shelly had managed to get her things inside and upstairs to her bedroom. Then, she’d directed him to the room across from hers. She had just finished washing up, and she was slipping into some cutoff jean shorts when there was a knock on the door. She tied her blue-and-white gingham shirt at the waist and opened the door to see a fresh-faced, cleaned-up Josh leaning against the frame.

He looked her up and down, and then moved back out into the corridor, glancing both ways. Pushing her back into her room and following her, he shut the door and leaned back against it, pinning her with fiery eyes. She had just finished tying her hair into a high but messy ponytail and hadn’t put on any shoes yet.

“Whatcha doin’, Josh?”

She watched as he reached down between his legs with one of his big hands, adjusting the hard-on that had very obviously formed behind the faded denim. And didn’t that just send a shiver of desire straight down between my thighs.

“Just looking at you. I had this exact fantasy in my car today.”

She licked her lips and moved closer to him. “Oh yeah? And what was the fantasy?”

He let his eyes travel down her legs, and then they came back up to rest on her face. “You in a cowgirl hat, some Daisy Dukes, and cowboy boots.”

Shelly laughed, placing a hand on his chest. “Well, one out of three ain’t bad, sugah.”

“When you talk like that, the other two don’t even need to exist.”

“Hmm,” Shelly hummed in the back of her throat. “We’ve still got an hour or so before dinner.”

“We do, don’t we?” Josh told her as he pushed himself off the door, starting to walk forward. Reaching out, he grasped the knot that rested over her navel.

With each step he took forward, Shelly took a step back. “And just what do you think we should do in those sixty or so minutes?”

“Well,” he drawled, his eyes watching his fingers as they untied the knot. “I think we should start with this,” he told her right before he gripped