“I know. You probably don’t hear it often.”
His eyes narrowed. “Try never.”
She winced. “I am sorry, but Lucas, I really need this job and I don’t want us to work together under false pretenses.”
A part of him relaxed a little. She wasn’t walking away at least. She was just trying to put him on notice. “Uh-huh.”
“That kiss notwithstanding, I really think we should just keep our relationship to teacher and student. Okay?”
Man, he thought, if Sean were here listening to this, his brother would be laughing his ass off. Hell, if it were happening to one of his brothers, Lucas would be doing the same thing. But it was damned hard to see the humor in the situation from his perspective.
On the other hand, Lucas mused as he watched her, Rose was the one to initiate that steam-inducing kiss—and she would have kept on kissing him if he hadn’t called a halt and taken a step back. Say what she wanted now, he had tasted her desire, felt her need wrapping itself around him. Rose Clancy wanted him as much as he wanted her—which would only work in his favor as he went about seducing her. Good to know that beneath her cool, prim, good-girl demeanor, she was burning with the same fire that was licking at his insides.
So…fine. He’d play along. Let her think she was in charge. Eventually, the game would shift in his favor.
Things always did.
She was watching him warily, waiting for his response, and damned if he wasn’t tempted to tell her to take her rules and get lost. He’d never before had a woman turn on him like this, especially after a kiss so hot—his lips still felt burned. And swallowing her “rules” was going to be hard to do, he knew. Yet, if he wanted his plan to work—and he really did—then he was going to have to go along with her…at least for now.
It grated, though, Lucas thought, as irritation spiked within him. He wasn’t used to sublimating his own wants to anyone else’s and if this is what it felt like, he had no interest in getting any better at it.
He looked at her and wanted her. He looked at her and wanted to turn and walk away. He looked at her and remembered her brother stabbing him and the rest of the Kings in the back and knew without a doubt that he wasn’t willing to give up on his plan. Not yet.
So he’d go along. He’d let her think she had won this round, because winning a battle didn’t mean winning the war. When this was over, it would be Lucas standing up and taking a bow. And it was that thought alone that had him nodding.
“Fine,” he growled. “We’ll do this your way.”
She blew out a breath and flashed him a grin. “That’s great. You’ll see, Lucas. This will all work much better now that we both know the rules.”
He watched her go to the passenger-side door and climb inside the already unlocked car. Alone in the flickering light of that lamp, Lucas clenched his jaw and promised himself that when this seduction ran its course and his payback had been achieved, he would be the one giving the not-my-type speech to Rose.
That realization had him smiling all the way home.
A week later, Rose was working on her home computer. This was her least favorite part of being self-employed. Well, there were also the quarterly tax reports. Frankly, anything to do with paperwork made her want to lie down on the couch until the resulting headache went away.
She loved cooking. Loved teaching others to do what she did best. But making what she loved a business demanded that she do a lot of what she hated, too.
Studying the spreadsheet across her computer screen, though, she had to smile. Thanks to Lucas King and the ridiculous amount of money he was willing to pay for cooking lessons, her bottom line was looking perceptibly better these days.
And her nerves were looking a lot worse, she acknowledged sadly. Picking up the mug in front of her, Rose took a long drink of her coffee and nearly gagged when she realized it had gone stone-cold. Grimacing at the taste, she carried the cup into the kitchen, saw the coffeepot was empty and automatically set it up to brew a fresh pot.
While the coffeemaker steamed and hissed and dripped, she leaned against her countertop and let her mind go to where, lately, it spent so much time.
Straight to Lucas.
In seconds, she was reliving that kiss again, as she had so many times over the last week. What had she been thinking? She should have edged away. Made an excuse. Laughed the tension off. But no, she’d had to grab his jacket lapels and drag him down for a kiss that was still reverberating through her seven days later.
“God, you’re an idiot,” she muttered, slapping one hand against the cool, gleaming surface of her cream-colored granite countertop.
She could still feel the hard thump of her heartbeat and the waves of desire that had crashed over her, nearly swamping her with a sense of need more desperate than she’d ever known before. Shaking her head, Rose absently reached for a dishtowel and dried and put away the few dishes sitting in the sink drainer while her mind taunted her by playing the memory of that kiss on a nonstop loop.
When she tired of torturing herself, she moved past that kiss and on to the strained conversation that had followed. She’d had to force herself to say what she had and heaven knew he hadn’t taken it well.
“But then,” she murmured, “why would he? No woman in her right mind would be pushing Lucas King away. No wonder he looked at me like I’d lost my mind.”
Maybe she had, at that. She considered the suggestion objectively. She was single. Unattached. Clearly drawn to Lucas and his kiss had practically curled her toes and she had still turned him down. “Yep. Crazy.”
When the phone rang, she jumped, then had to slap one hand to her chest to hold her heart in place. Shaking her head, she reached across the counter, and checked the caller ID. Smiling, she answered it. “Dee, hi.”
“I hate caller ID,” her best friend said. “There are too few surprises in life anyway. Answering the phone should be like biting into a chocolate. A lottery, sort of. Will you get caramel or fruit and nuts?”
“Speaking of nuts,” Rose said, still smiling, “what’s going on?”
“Seriously?” Delilah James laughed and it was a deep, rumbling chuckle. “I’m calling for a passion update, of course.”
“There is no update, and I’m sorry I ever told you about that kiss,” Rose said, staring at the coffeemaker as if willing it to finish already. She’d need a lot more caffeine to deal with her best friend.
Delilah and Rose had met as roommates their freshman year of college and had bonded like sisters before the end of the first month of school. With similar backgrounds—each of them having been raised by wealthy, domineering fathers—they’d had a lot in common. The only difference being that at college, Dee had found the strength to stand up to her family’s demands, while Rose hadn’t.