Free Guilty Pleasures by Stella Cameron

you. Maybe you could find some place to sit down out there and wait?”
    “It’s not a good time.”
    Nasty pushed up onto his elbows. When he put a hand on Seven, those claws went to work again. He sucked in a sharp breath.
    “What’s the matter?” Polly took a step toward him. “You’re hurt!”
    “No, I’m not. I’m fine.”
    Her gaze shifted, as he’d known it would, to the cat. Seven peeked back at her over his hip. “Nice cat,” she said, swallowing loudly enough to sound like a trigger snick.
    Nasty fell back. He fell back, draped a forearm over his eyes, and laughed. Seven’s weight departed abruptly. Nasty kept on laughing. He fought for breath and wiped tears from his eyes.
    Polly’s rapt attention was on his face again. She pointed over her sho ulder. “I’ll… I’ll wait in there, if you’re sure that ’s okay.”
    He found enough air to say, “Yes. Yes, please.”
    She spun away, the wrong way, and bumped into the bulkhead. Her faint, “Oh,” was all Nasty heard before she rushed from the cabin.
    Swinging his feet to the floor, he listened closely, afraid he’d hear her leaving the boat. If she did, he’d run after her— with or without clothes.
    He didn’t hear a sound.
    She’d come looking for him. She’d found out which boat was his and where it was moored and actually come.
    The nearest locker yielded a pair of wrinkled jeans shorts. He tore them out, stuffed his feet through the legs, and hauled them up—and gritted his teeth when he closed the zipper too carelessly.
    He ducked his head and stepped through the doorway. Polly stood in the middle of the saloon with Seven brushing around her ankles.
    “Hi.” She gave him a wiggle-fingered little wave. “Your partner told me where I might find you. I should have called, but I didn’t think there were phones on boats.”
    “Cell phone,” he said. “Radio works, too. And you can hook up phone lines when you’re at moorage.”
    “I see.” She saw him, from head to toe, and parts in between, and then she blushed. “I don’t know much about boats.”
    “What do you think of this one?”
    “It’s very nice. I didn’t know you could have wood-burning stoves, and”—she indicated the teak and brass and leather, and Oriental carpets—“and all this. Like a comfortable house. You’ve got great taste.”
    “Thanks.”
    Yellow butterflies were scattered across the high-waisted white dress she wore. When she shrugged her shoulders, the waist became a sweet halter for her pretty breasts. He’d like to see her breasts, to hold them, to do what it would take to make them respond to him.
    “Look, I really apologize,” he told her in a rush. “When you live alone you get careless about things like clothes.”
    “Oh, you don’t have to apologize.”
    “Yes, I do. I’m sure I shocked you.”
    “Not at all,” she told him. “No, I wasn’t shocked.”
    He wrinkled his brow. “You weren’t? I thought you might not be too thrilled to be confronted with—”
    “No, really! Honestly, you looked very nice.”
    They stared at each other. Nasty couldn’t keep the question out of his eyes. He saw the confusion in hers.
    “Perhaps you want to say you didn’t really mean that?” he suggested.
    “No”—her tilted smile was wry—“no, I don’t. I shouldn’t have said it, but it’s true. Doesn’t that make me a forward woman?”
    “It makes you exactly what I felt you were. You’re a woman who tries to say it like it is.”
    “You can say that after the other day?”
    Nasty checked the old ship’ s clock on the bulkhead above the shelves of b ooks. “It’s noon. We could… No, you don’t drink anything but tea, do you? I’ll make tea if you’ll drink it.”
    “I like white wine.”
    “I’ve got white wine.”
    “I guess it must be fate then, again?” She slid into the dark green leather banquette that curled around three sides of a teak table. “This is so lovely. Have you lived here