Red Hot Holiday Bundle(14)

It was time to do a little prodding of her own.

Randy lay spooned up behind her, his arm draped over her waist, his breathing deep and even. She turned onto her stomach, sidled closer and trailed tiny kisses over his collarbone.

He smelled warm and clean; he tasted alive. He felt as if he belonged between her cool cotton sheets for more than one night, and that left her shaken because this was supposed to be a no-strings-attached fling.

When she finally looked up, she found his eyes wide open, his lashes thick and sweeping. For several seconds, she remained still, catching her breath that he’d stolen, measuring the hard beats of both of their hearts.

Then, pushing onto her hands and knees, she crawled over his body and stared down. “My turn.”

“Be my guest,” he said, rolling onto his back, his hands at her hips settling her over his groin. His penis stirred between her spread thighs.

“I wasn’t talking about sex,” she said, eyes narrowed. “It’s time to talk.”

He fought a grin. “We talked already.”

“I talked. I answered your question.” She leaned forward, braced her hands on his shoulders. “Now you answer mine.”

“Okay.” He nodded where he lay on the pillow, reached up with one hand to toy with the ends of her hair. “Nothing.”

She flexed her fingers into the muscles of his shoulders. “Nothing what?”

“You asked me what I was hiding behind my sports car and designer suits. I answered nothing.”

She didn’t believe him. She knew image. She knew disguises. It was her business, after all.

She also knew all about hiding. She didn’t talk about it, but she knew. “The car doesn’t fit. That’s a response to a midlife crisis, not a way to get around town.”

He rubbed the thumb of his other hand over her hipbone, his penis growing thick. “It gets the job done.”

“As does my Camry,” she countered, hating the creeping distraction of sex.

“You’re not a believer in ‘if you’ve got it, flaunt it’?”

“No. But neither are you.”

“You sure you know me that well?”

Strangely enough, she was. “I know that you’re too comfortable in your own skin to show off.”

“I don’t need to. I let the clothes do it for me.”

She growled down. “You are so full of it.”

“That makes the wrong one of us,” he said, sliding one of her hands away from his shoulder and down the center of his body to his cock.

She wrapped him in her fingers, stroked him, squeezed him. “That’s all I’m going to get?”

He surged into her hand. “I haven’t had complaints before.”

“I wasn’t talking about your equipment.” And selfishly she didn’t like thinking about the women he’d had before. “I was talking about you not answering my question. I answered yours.”

“I gave you an answer.”

“It was evasive and circular and hardly forthcoming,” she said, teasing though honest. When he remained silent, she added, “I told you about Wayne.”

“I knew a Wayne when I was younger.” His fingers flexed on her thighs. “He ran the soup kitchen where I ate a lot of my meals.”

Her hand stilled, as did her whole body. “Why did you eat in soup kitchens?”

“Because the couple who adopted me didn’t just take me in.” His expression grew chilled. “They made sure I understood where I had come from and where I would end up if I didn’t pay attention.”

“Pay attention to what?” she asked, her broken voice barely recognizable. Where in the world had he come from?

“To the fact that money does buy happiness.”

No. She wasn’t buying it. “You can’t believe that.”

“I’ve never been happier in my life.”

“But not because of money.”

“Sure. Money buys me the designer suits and the sports car.”

She slid off his thighs to sit cross-legged beside him. “So, your happiness is dependent on what you own.”

He hesitated a moment, stacking his hands beneath his head. “Not so much on what I own as on knowing that I don’t have to do without.”

It wasn’t hard to understand the sentiment. Having money made a lot of life easier to deal with. But money buying happiness?

She started to tell him that doing without was hardly the end of the world. But she stopped because she wouldn’t know a thing about it.

She’d never missed a meal she didn’t need to miss. Her survival had never been tied to the generosity of others. Randy’s obviously had.

And he’d responded by guaranteeing, like Scarlet, that he would never go hungry again.