“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?” she crooned, her fingers brushing up and down his arm. If she didn’t stop, he’d run the car right off the road.
“Are you offering to sleep with me?”
She gasped. “What? No! What gave you that idea?”
“You said we’d come to an agreement where we’d both walk away satisfied.” He looked at her hand on his arm then up at her face. As realization sunk in, her face turned pink and she snatched back her hand. “What other message did you think I’d get from you touching me like that?” Shifting in his seat to make room in his jeans, he chuckled, amused by her discomfort. He shouldn’t be the only one uncomfortable.
She sat tall in her seat and pointed her feet straight ahead. “I didn’t . . . I would never offer sex as a form of payment. I just thought we’d come to some sort of payment arrangement, you know, like you’d hold the mortgage and I could pay monthly with a balloon payment at the end. How did you ever get sex from that?”
How had she lived in New York on her own and yet still be so naïve? He couldn’t help feeling protective of her—even though he was the one she needed protecting from. “You must not know men well, because we get sex out of everything. And for future reference, if you leave it to a man to come up with payment arrangements, don’t act surprised when he tries to collect it in your bed.” Although he tried to keep his gaze on the road, her movement that he caught out of the corner of his eye drew his attention.
Portia had lifted her leg and straightened it out in front of her.
“What are you doing?” he asked. “Your leg looks as though it’s trying to detach itself from your body and make a clean getaway.”
“It does?” She glanced at her own leg and quickly lowered it, crossing it at her ankles. “I have a couple of nervous habits. One of them is to dance no matter if it’s appropriate or not. I’ve danced for so many years, my body doesn’t know how to stop. I’ll try to rein it in.”
“No, don’t,” he said a bit too enthusiastically. Her innocence was doing a number on him. He softened his voice. “I like it. It’s cute.”
She snorted. “Cute? No one has ever called me cute.”
He made a left into Braden’s neighborhood. “Then you’ve been hanging out with a bunch of idiots because you’re just about the cutest woman I’ve ever met. Not to mention sexy as hell.”
He didn’t know how a woman as beautiful as Portia could have such low self-esteem. He’d met hundreds of debutantes throughout the years and not one of them held a candle to her. What they did have, they accentuated and held their heads high with confidence. He decided right then he’d make it his mission to instill a bit of that into Portia over the next few months. It was the least he could do.
He took a peek at her. “You’re blushing.”
“Yeah.” She sighed. “My other nervous habit. And don’t say it’s cute. It’s not. I turn into a lobster when I’m embarrassed and when I . . .”
His pants grew tight again as he let his imagination finish her sentence and visualize her head thrown back in climax. “When you . . . ?”
“I don’t want to say it.” She covered her face with her hands. “I don’t want to put that image in your head.”
“Now you’re putting all sorts of images in my head.” Naughty, dirty, sexy images of the two of them in positions only a flexible dancer could manage.
“Stop it.” She playfully punched his shoulder.
He shrugged. “It’s like those pop-ups on the Internet. I can’t prevent it.”
She shifted in her seat, giving him reason to believe he wasn’t the only one with a creative imagination. “Let’s change the subject.”
“Fine, but no talking about agreements. It will only keep my imagination running wild.”
The car filled with silence, and despite his good intentions, images of her sweaty and blushing naked body continued to run rampant through his brain. He didn’t know how to stop.
“It’s nice of Braden to let me borrow a car. Is he seeing anyone?”
Okay, that did it. Nothing like the name of his best friend on her lips to kill his libido. “He’s seeing lots of people. Why?”
“Just curious.” She drummed her fingers along the door handle. “So he owns the restaurant?”
“Yes, among other things,” he said slowly, wondering why she had such an interest and why it bothered him so much.
“What other things?”
“Why all the interest in Braden? You should know he’s not the kind of guy to settle down. He dates. A lot. Not that he’s not a good guy, he is. He’s the best. But he’s not your type.”