Free Jaded by Anne Calhoun Page A

and she better be ready to take whatever she dished out.
    “More,” she breathed.
    With a twist of hips and shoulders he surged to his feet and pressed her into the narrow space between the fridge and the door to the dining room. She wound her legs around his hips and her arms around his neck, the better to revel in the sensation of his arm under her bottom and that delicious, sensitizing scruff against her mouth.
    When her hands scrabbled at the back of his T-shirt, he leaned into her, using his chest to keep her in place and reached back to haul his shirt over his head, then drop it to the floor. Greedily she skimmed her palm up his ribs, feeling bone and muscle shift as he ground against her.
    A car door slammed across the street. Lucas dragged his mouth from hers and peered over his shoulder at the screen door. “Better take this somewhere more private.”
    His voice was a low rumble that rasped like velvet against her nipples and sex. “Agreed,” she whispered. She expected him to set her on her feet, but instead he carried her down the short hallway to her bedroom. Again, she expected him to put her down, but instead he bore her backward onto the bed. The sensation of hips between her legs, a warm, lightly furred male chest and broad shoulders looming over her, and those deep brown eyes sent a kick of arousal against her chest.
    “Tell me what you want now.”
     • • • 
    WHEN ALANA’S EYES widened, Lucas gave himself a hard mental shake.
    Slow down. Forget that it’s been months since you had sex. It’s only been a couple of days. Maybe even a couple of hours. This woman thinks she can hurt you. That’s how inexperienced she is. She can’t see who you are, what you are. If you rush her into anything she’s going to furl up like a flower.
    Alana had covered the bed with an old-fashioned chenille spread tucked over the pillows. Spring twilight darkened outside the windows, casting soft shadows over the dresser and the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. Roller shades with beaded fringes covered the windows. In an effort to make a house with a frankly ugly kitchen more appealing to a tenant, he’d stripped the wallpaper before she moved in, and painted the walls a soft white. The room felt old-fashioned, delicate, much like Alana.
    The contrast between ladylike furnishing and demeanor and the tension thrumming between them seeped into his veins to pool in his cock.
    He didn’t add words to the heated air quivering between them. He just let the silence stretch between them, let her decide. He knew how to wait out suspects. Some days he felt like if he never had to speak another word, he’d be good with that. Words didn’t fix anything, and more often than not, he found the wrong ones.
    He made a conscious effort to dampen his usual intensity, breathing slow and deep, forcing his hands to relax on her hips, leaning back imperceptibly. He also knew how to use his body to intimidate and coerce, and while turning it off wasn’t easy, he tried. His reward was the slow seep of trust and arousal back into Alana’s face. The muscles around her eyes relaxed as her lids drooped, and her mouth softened into a fullness he found sexy as hell. She rarely wore anything more than a lipstick one shade darker than her lips. Damned good thing, too, because she had the kind of wide, full mouth men dreamed about.
    She peered up at him through soft black lashes. “Anything I want?”
    No way in hell could this woman come up with something he wouldn’t do, so he nodded without reservation.
    “Lie down.”
    The . . . request? Hardly. Command? Demand? Instruction? A little of all three? . . . surprised him when not much surprised him anymore. He tried to remember the last time a woman wanted to work him over, and failed. He tugged the spread down to the foot of the bed, stacked the pillows, then stretched out on his back. The light from the dim reading lamp beside the bed gilded her bobbed hair as it slid forward,