around.”
“What do you tell them you do?”
“They don’t usually ask.”
“They don’t?”
“No,” he said.
She had to take two stairs at a time to try and keep up with his long stride. At only five three, she wasn’t exactly long legged, and she guessed he was more than a foot taller than she was. “What do they ask?”
He stopped and turned to her and she didn’t manage to stop her stride in time, putting herself right in front of him, her eyes level with the center of his chest. “They don’t usually talk this much,” he said, eyes intent on hers.
She sucked in a shuddering breath, suddenly finding it hard to stand straight. She’d never been so close to a man who was so…so much. That’s what it was. Alik was just too much. Too masculine, too unrefined, too sexy. Oh, he was much too sexy. He was also too immoral, too unemotional and too much a stranger for her to be going weak-kneed over him.
Yet again, her body didn’t seem to care much for the common sense take on things.
“I see.”
“Do you?” he asked, his head cocked to the side.
“Y-yes.”
Why wasn’t he moving? She couldn’t back up, then she would betray that she was unnerved by his closeness. She was, but he didn’t need to know that. He needed to move on up the stairs so that she could breathe again. So that her body would feel like it belonged to her again.
“You don’t approve,” he said, turning away and continuing up the stairs.
The knot that had been building in her chest frayed and loosened, releasing a gust of air from her lungs. “I’m not judging,” she said.
“You are judging.”
“Only a little. Because clearly, Leena as evidence, you have some control issues when it comes to women.”
“I do not have control issues,” he said.
“Really?” They reached the top of the stairs and Alik didn’t turn on any lights.
“Really,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Saying I have control issues implies that I fail at stopping myself from conducting liaisons with women when the simple truth is, I give in willingly. Unless I’m on duty, I don’t see the point in abstaining.”
“I don’t even know what to say to that. And I don’t believe that that’s sufficient evidence that you don’t have an issue with control. I find you self-indulgent.”
“I am extremely self-indulgent. And also quite indulgent of my partners. But it still doesn’t speak to a lack of control.” He took a step toward her, and she took one away from him. Her back came up against the wall and her breathing stopped altogether.
“I think it does,” she said, unwilling to back down.
“Oh, Jada, if I had a lack of control—” he advanced on her again, and she found herself without anywhere to flee “—you would know.”
“I would?” She cursed her mouth. It was part of the mutiny against common sense her body was currently executing while her brain looked on in horror.
“I would have kissed you by now. I would have pulled you into my arms and tasted your lips, your throat. I would have put my hand on your breast, felt your nipples getting hard beneath my fingers. Then my tongue.”
She turned her head to the side. It was the only way she could force herself not to look at him, the only way to keep herself from being drawn into his web.
He chuckled and she looked back. He had moved away from her, continuing on down the hall. “Lucky for you,” he said, “I have no such control issues.”
Insults flooded her mind, insults that wanted badly to escape and fly at his head. However, for some reason, now she had some sort of handle on her self-control and she couldn’t speak them. A cruel joke.
It took her a moment, but she could finally speak again. “I wouldn’t let you.”
“I’m not so sure that’s true,” he said, stopping at a door that looked very much like the rest of the doors to her. “This is you.”
“So it is,” she said, still not convinced. Everything looked the same to her and this place was like a maze. “And I wouldn’t let you.”
He looked at her, and she felt every heated word he’d said pouring into her. Felt it beneath her skin, promises of sensual pleasure that went well beyond her experience.
She didn’t know where that thought had come from. She knew about sex and she’d had plenty of it. She seriously doubted that there was sensual pleasure she