so sure.
“But they didn’t kiss like you.” Yeah, she really should quit talking.
The color of Jude’s eyes deepened, darkening with an emotion Sarah couldn’t label. Instinctively, she liked his warm expression, though. She liked it a lot.
“How did I kiss, Sarah?”
He cupped her face now, stared into her eyes, and his voice had a husky tone to it that made her want to listen to him say her name over and over.
All night long.
Wine, stop it.
“Like you could set my body on fire and make me happy to go up in flames.”
Oops. That had slipped out. Maybe she needed to zip her lips.
Zip her lips?
She was reverting to preschool.
Or maybe the way Jude was looking at her, touching her, had her intelligence on hold.
He quirked a brow. “You know my job is to put out fires, right?”
“My guess is that you’ve started more than a few, too.” She swallowed, half expecting him to sweep her off her feet and carry her to his bedroom all Rhett Butler style.
Would she stop him?
Or would she give in to the curiosity of how good Jude Davenport could make her feel? Because she knew being the focus of this man’s attention in bed would be unlike anything she’d ever imagined possible.
Before that moment, that was, because right now her imagination was endless.
Jude stared into her eyes for long moments. “What are you doing tomorrow evening, Sarah Grayson?”
CONFUSED, SARAH BLINKED. Tomorrow evening? Shouldn’t he be worried about what she was doing right then? At that moment? In the next fifteen minutes? No, Jude wouldn’t be a fifteen-minute man. He’d be hours and hours.
There went her imagination again. Endless.
“Working,” she answered, thinking he couldn’t really have just asked if she was busy, because she didn’t expect him to want more than just a rumble between his sheets.
Or was that his normal routine? Make the woman think he was interested in more than just one night before luring her into his bed?
Hadn’t he already figured out that she needed no further luring? She was curious and purring for more.
“How about Friday evening?” he asked, his thumb sliding across her cheek. “Are you working then?”
Her forehead scrunched. “No, but—”
“Plans?”
“No, but—” She was going to tell him she didn’t want idle promises of seeing him again. If she agreed. And she would. Why not let a man like Jude introduce her to what all the sex hype was about? Sexual Orgasm for Beginners?
Ha! She’d bet anything he’d move straight into an advanced course. Maybe Advanced Multiple Wows, or something along those lines.
“Would you give me the privilege of taking you to your first Broadway show on Friday evening?”
Their minds clearly on two different subjects, Sarah’s head spun and she frowned at him in bewilderment. “Why would you want to do that?”
Why was he talking about Friday evening when they were in the here and now and his bedroom was only a few feet away?
“I’d like to take you to watch Phantom of the Opera.”
“What? Why?”
“I’d like to fulfill that desire of yours.”
Which was where her brain had been, not on watching a play. But he meant...he was saying...asking...
“As a...” she’d been going to say “friend”, but, whatever they were, they weren’t friends “...neighbor?”
He chuckled. “As someone who’d like to kiss you goodnight again. Soon.”
“Oh.” She bit her lower lip. Part of her wanted to throw caution to the wind and say yes, and to please just go ahead and kiss her again right now, like she’d thought he was going to do. Would that be soon enough? But she wasn’t a throw-caution-to-the-wind kind of girl. She was a logical girl who avoided men like him because they used women. She knew he used women. She saw the parade of usees leaving his apartment the morning after.
She was not a usee. She’d been thinking about becoming one, had even been thinking of using him to give her the pleasure wielded at his fingertips, which would make her a user, too. What she hadn’t been thinking of was going on a date with Jude Davenport.
That terrified her much more than the thought of having sex with him.
Sex was nothing to Jude. Maybe dates weren’t either. But to her, at that moment, dragging him into his bedroom and stripping him naked felt safer than agreeing to a date.
No.
She would not set herself up for that particular disappointment again.
“I can tell you are way over-thinking this,” he pointed out, lifting her chin to where she was looking into his eyes again. “It’s just a date, Sarah.”
Just a date. She hadn’t misread what he’d been offering. Jude wanted to take her on a date. A real date.
“I’m not your type,” she reminded him, positive that agreeing to go with him would be a bad idea, that to do so would be setting herself up for disappointment the way Kenny had never come close to.
What if she grew emotionally attached?
No, she knew better than to do that with a man like Jude. If they went out, it would be because he was tired tonight, but was interested in pursuing the sexual chemistry between them at a later time. On Friday night. Taking her to watch a Broadway show was no big deal to Jude, merely a form of foreplay.
She needed to be careful not to make his offer into more than what it was.
“And I’m not your type,” he countered her response, his eyes full of delicious promise. “So how about you say you’ll go to dinner and to see Phantom of the Opera with me? We will have a good time. I’ll be on my best behavior and give you a night you’ll never forget. I give my word.”
The man could sell sand in the middle of the desert.
“And then what?” she ventured, trying to play out in her mind what would happen after their “date”. “You expect me to sleep with you and then me to sneak out of your apartment the next morning?”
His expression didn’t waver.
