knew how to say goodbye before breakfast.
So why wasn’t he pushing her away?
A pink flush rose on her cheeks, and her chest heaved gently as she looked at him with pleading eyes. She wanted this badly. He was no stranger to women’s desires, but something told him there was more involved here than a little elemental lust.
“Look, sweetheart, maybe you’d better—”
“Would you do it for a hundred dollars?”
“What?”
“I—I hear you’re worth it.”
He almost laughed, but she sounded so serious that he caught it before it came out. “So you know who I am?”
She nodded.
Cole sighed. More proof that his legend lived on.
He took her by the shoulders and looked at her as platonically as he knew how. “Now, look. I’m not arguing the value of my services, and I don’t remember a time in my life when I turned down easy money—”
“So you’ll do it?”
“No!”
She sighed, then circled her gaze around the room. “That’s okay, I guess. There’s bound to be somebody else here—”
Cole clamped his hand onto her forearm and hauled her off the dance floor, pulling her toward the opposite side of the room. When he reached a secluded spot next to the bar, he backed her up against the wall beneath a neon beer advertisement.
“Now, listen up! It’s not a good idea to go flashing a bunch of cash in a bar full of drunk cowboys, offering to pay them to do something that’s liable to turn into something else!”
“Something else?”
Good God. How had this woman survived life so far? He stared at her pointedly.
She looked away. “Oh. That.”
“Yes, that, maybe whether you want it or not. You don’t want to tangle with some of these guys, especially the closer it gets to closing time.”
Closing time. It was a little after eight now. He’d better get a move on if he expected to make a decision on a fiancée, or it was going to be a really short engagement.
“Maybe it would be best if you headed on home,” he said. “The later it gets around here, the rowdier it gets. It’s not a good place for a nice girl—”
“Don’t say that!”
Cole stepped back, startled. Those soft brown eyes were suddenly shooting fire.
“I’m not a nice girl! I mean, I am, but I don’t want to be!” She glanced at the bartender, a six-foot-three, two-hundred-pound slab of beef who was simultaneously drawing a beer and eyeing a brunette whose tank top was working overtime trying to contain her generous upper body. “That bartender is a possibility, I guess. Maybe I’ll ask him—”
“No!”
Cole pulled her around, wondering if her problem was confined to naïveté or whether there was an unhealthy dose of insanity thrown in. “I don’t get it. Why in the world would you pay a man to kiss you?”
She shrugged a little and looked at her feet, which she didn’t seem to be too steady on at the moment. “Because I want to know what it feels like.”
For a minute Cole wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. Then all at once the truth hit him like a brick to the side of the head. “You’ve never been kissed before?”
She continued her examination of those weird-looking boots of hers, her cheeks the color of ripe strawberries, and he had his answer.
Good Lord. How had this happened? How did any woman get through puberty and adolescence and into adulthood without so much as a kiss? Sure, she was plain, but he’d seen far less attractive women who’d managed to hook a man. How had things gone so wrong when it was so easy to make them right?
Then he pictured her sidling up next to that bruiser of a bartender and making him the same offer. Either the man would laugh his head off and humiliate her or take advantage of the situation in ways Cole didn’t even want to think about.
“I heard something once about six cheerleaders,” the woman said, her blush deepening. “I figured one little kiss wouldn’t be a big deal.”
Damn, was that story carved in granite somewhere? If so, it was time he found a stick of dynamite and did away with it permanently.
“Two things,” Cole told her. “First of all, don’t believe everything you hear. And secondly, a kiss is a big deal. Especially if you’ve never done it before.”
Those liquid brown eyes came up to meet his. They weren’t exactly beautiful—nothing about her was—but something about the way she stared at him made his throat feel tight and muddled up his thinking. Her lips parted slightly, and she touched the tip of her tongue to her lower lip, leaving it damp and glistening. There was nothing deliberately seductive about it, and maybe that’s why it was so…seductive.
Pay attention, Tonya. You’re about to get an eyeful.
“Kissing is like dancing,” he told her softly, moving his hands up to cradle her face. “You just do what comes naturally.”
She stared at him with that look of terror again, swallowing as if there were a golf ball lodged in her throat. He thought of getting it over with quickly to put her out of her misery, but then again, if she was after a hundred-dollar kiss, he figured that’s what he ought to give her.
He brushed his lips against hers. Her cheeks were tense, her jaw fixed, her mouth a firm, unyielding line.
“Relax,” he said. “This is supposed to be fun.”
He met her lips again, but this time he persisted, fixing his mouth firmly over hers until she had no choice but to give in. He stroked his thumbs along her cheekbones, feeling skin as soft as powder.
Then he wrapped his arm around the back of her neck and cradled her head in the crook of his elbow. He tilted her backward slightly, and at the same time he brought his other hand down to circle her rib cage just beneath her breast.
She gasped a little at his touch, parting her lips at the same time, and he took the opportunity to delve deeper. He teased the tip of his tongue against her lips in gentle exploration, then slipped it into her mouth and twined it softly with hers. He could feel her surprise, as if she’d never imagined kissing could involve something like that. But a moment later she slid one hand around his neck and the other over his shoulder, pulling him closer, asking for more, as if she’d just tasted an unknown delicacy and couldn’t get enough of it. Her eager response sent a jolt of awareness through him, and all at once he realized that if she’d never been kissed, then that meant she also hadn’t—
No. He’d never made love to a virgin, and he wasn’t about to start now. Too damn much responsibility there. But kissing one? Now that was another thing entirely. A thing he hadn’t realized could be quite so…enjoyable.
He moved his hand to the small of her back and pulled her tightly against him, her breasts crushed to his chest, heat coursing from her body to his. He thought he heard a catcall or two in the background, but he ignored the crowd and the raucous music and the flashing lights around them, making sure that from now on she’d know exactly what a hundred-dollar kiss felt like.
Then her knees buckled a little, and out of fear that she might actually pass out, he finally pulled away, his arm still wrapped around her back holding her snugly against him. Slowly she opened her eyes, wearing a glassy-eyed, thoroughly kissed expression that sent a shock wave right to his groin.
“I lied,” she said. “I don’t have a hundred dollars.”
“Then I guess I’ll have to take the kiss back.”
He pressed his lips to hers again