long body. The sensual assault of his lips and tongue was hot, relentless, delicious. He tasted like danger and joy and sin and nothing she’d ever imagined in a man or in a kiss.
If this mind-numbing desire was what she thought she’d wanted, she must have been out of her mind. It was incredible. Addictive. And terrifying.
A hungry little moan escaped her lips, and she couldn’t believe that sound came from her. “I want you,” she murmured, breathless, trembling.
“And I want to know what this is all about.”
His harsh tone was like a splash of cold water. She pushed away. “That again?”
“What do you really want, Emily? What are you doing here?” When she made no reply, Tyler smiled. It was a very dark, crooked smile. “Did you really think I’d take this any further when I know you’re still lying to me?”
“I am not!” Emily was furious. Humiliated, dripping with desire, and furious. “Okay, my name is Emily Chaplin. I lied about Bond. Big deal. I sort of ran away from home for the weekend and I didn’t want my mother to find me.” A new thought occurred to her. “Shoot. I wasn’t supposed to use my credit cards, either. But I forgot when I did the Gap thing.”
“Which is why the delivery boy knew your real name.”
“I didn’t say I was good at this. Yet.” She sighed. “Okay, so I already told you I’m a lawyer. That’s true. You also know I’m from Chicago because I was on the same plane you were. What else do you need to know?”
“No, I didn’t know you were from Chicago,” he said tightly. “So you spotted me on the plane and decided to follow me off? You are a stalker.”
“No, I did not follow you off the plane!” Actually, she’d followed him on the plane, which was even worse. “I didn’t see you during the flight at all,” she said, sticking to a grain of truth. “Not until I went to get a cab, and there you were. You remember, the taxi driver grabbed my briefcase and asked if I wanted to share. I came to San Francisco on a whim, I admit that. But I’m not a stalker. And I didn’t have anywhere better to go, so when you said you were going to North Beach, I thought why not? And then the B and B was so wonderful, it just seemed like fate. Like kismet. It even has a Kismet room! So I stayed.”
That sounded plausible, didn’t it? And less bizarre than the real story.
“So that’s when you started following me, after you came to the B and B? You’re saying you just stumbled into this when that guy came through my window?”
She avoided the direct question. “My motives were really very good. I wanted to help you. I could tell you were in trouble and I wanted to help. That is the absolute truth,” she swore.
“Little Ms. Emily Chaplin, lawyer from Chicago.” He ran a careless hand through the dark strands of his hair. “And let me guess—you’ve never done anything like this before in your life, and you decided this was your big chance to attach yourself to a bad boy in a leather jacket and get a ride to the wrong side of the tracks, am I right?”
“No.” She hesitated. “Okay, well, kind of. I mean, yes, I’ve never done anything like this before. But no to the rest of it.”
“Listen to me, Emily,” he told her, putting even more distance between them, stabbing a finger in the air. “I am nobody’s walk on the wild side. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you. But you’re being ridiculous.” She rushed to catch up before he left her in the park all by herself. “I’m not asking for a walk on the wild side. I’m telling you, you need my help.”
He flashed her a very unpleasant look.
“You can deny it all you like,” she persisted, “but we’re a good team. Where would you have been tonight without me? Sliced and diced in Shanda Leer’s living room?”
“I was doing fine.”
“Oh, yeah, right. I saved your adorable butt, Tyler O’Toole, and you know it.” Oops. She was supposed to leave out the adorable part.
His lips curved with amusement.
“Well, it’s the truth,” Emily insisted. “And you owe me.”
He stopped without warning, and she crashed into him before she could put on the brakes. But his hands bracketed her shoulders, holding her steady. “What exactly do you think I owe you?”
The first thing that flashed into her mind was a roll on the leather bed in The Wild One?
Best to keep that thought to herself.
“You at least owe me dinner,” she decided instead. “I really am starving.” In more ways than one. Love, sex, food…she had an abiding hunger for all of them. Best to keep that to herself, too.
“Okay. Dinner it is. Come on.” His long strides sent him down Columbus Avenue ahead of her. “I doubt ol’ Mack or anybody else will think to look for us in a restaurant. At the very least it’ll waste a few hours, and then maybe it will be safe to go back to Beau’s.” He regarded her with a speculative look. “And we can talk, you and I. How about we make a deal? For every question you answer about yourself and what you’re doing here, I’ll take a question, too. What do you say?”
“Deal,” she answered without a moment’s hesitation, positive she had the best of that bargain. The life of boring Emily Chaplin was an open book.
The life of mysterious Tyler O’Toole was better than any spy novel.
TYLER REFILLED her wineglass, congratulating himself on an excellent strategy. After the kiss-and-tell in Washington Square had backfired, he’d switched to Plan B—ply her with pasta, a nice, smooth Chianti, a little more Chianti, and eventually she’d tell him anything he wanted to know.
He now had her entire résumé and then some, including a blow-by-blow account of her trip to The Flesh Pit. Meanwhile, he’d relied on dodging, obfuscation and evasion, and she hadn’t learned one thing about him. Nice girls were so easy it wasn’t even a fair fight.
“What do you do for a living?” she’d asked.
“Nothing at the moment.”
There was a pause. “And what did you do when you still did something?”
He’d shrugged. “This and that.”
Her eyes had narrowed. “What did whatever you did have to do with hookers and strippers?”
That took him by surprise. “Who told you I had anything to do with hookers or strippers?”
“Kate.”
He’d made a mental note to have a talk with Kate. To Emily, he’d offered another shrug. “Let’s just say I have a weakness for underdogs. I offered help when they needed it.”
“Like me!” she’d said happily. “Like me with you.”
And as neatly as that, they were successfully off the subject of him and back to her.
Of course, that still didn’t explain why
