Reading Online Novel

Taking the Score(32)



The curve of his smile against her neck sent tingles tripping across her skin. “I’m glad we’re not a secret anymore. I don’t like secrets.”

We. Hell, if she didn’t love that a little too much. She snorted, tried to turn it into a self-deprecating laugh. “Then you’re hanging with the wrong girl.”

“Maybe you should trust me. I handled your stripper reveal so well.”

She sank back. Never had she encountered a chest as perfectly designed for leaning as Brody’s. “By giving me an anger orgasm.”

“The best kind.”

A shared chuckle warmed the space between them. They remained there, enjoying the quiet intimacy wrapping around them like the night.

“You’re a puzzle,” he murmured hotly against her ear, “and I want to work you out.”

“So your strategy is to come right out and ask me who I am?”

“It never hurts to be direct.”

Emma had always found directness overrated. “Guess you’ll just have to use your big brain to figure me out.”

She heard his loud thoughts, permutations of that quick brain running a mile a minute. “Might need something bigger than that.”

Suddenly he was no longer blanketing her in the rock-hard embrace of his body. She went to turn and he checked her with a gruff, “No.”

Her breath hitched in anticipation. Trying to interpret the sounds behind her was a new brand of torture. That schwipp noise? His belt removal. Soft plucks signaled shirt buttons entering a state of undone. A light whoosh of fabric falling to the terrace assured her this beautiful man would be naked if she turned around.

Turning around was all she could think about.

“I don’t care how good you look naked, Brody Kane, you won’t get a word out of me.” She knew it was all fun and games, but his patience at her reticence had to be wearing thin.

“Look at me.”

She did. Oh, how she did.

Her gaze strayed down his magnificent body—the lightly matted chest, the happy trail, his perfect cock already springing to life, muscular legs that tapered to…TARDIS socks?

“You’re wearing them?” Her gift. It should not be sexy, but it was, and more than a little heart-shattering.

He placed his hands on his hips, standing before her like a golden god, the winking city lights making him glow. “These socks really pissed me off, Emma. Everything about this situation”—he motioned between them—“pissed me off. Your strip-club antics, your cranky cat, your cute-awful singing, your walking around half naked in my T-shirt in my home. My perma-boner, your jealous nipples, my inability to get any work done in your presence. My inability to get any work done when not in your presence. Most of all, what pissed me off is that stubborn streak of yours.”

Something shifted inside her, something huge. Admitting all this couldn’t have been easy for someone as reserved as Brody. He was taking a chance here. On her.

Defenses in tatters, she could no longer resist his lie-detecting stare, not when he was standing there, naked and unafraid. She needed to be seen by him, right down to the marrow.

“What do you want to know?”

Foxy fast, he’d taken her in his arms, soothing her tremble before she even knew it was racking her body.

“Anything, Emma. Anything that will let me inside that beautiful skull of yours.”

She hauled in a breath and spoke into the warm skin of his neck. “I—I lied to get the job at Score Property. Faked my résumé.”

“Lots of people do that,” he said, no surprise in his voice. “It’s not a big deal.”

It was to her, and she didn’t want him to dismiss it as merely the standard tactics of a desperate job hunter. Daisy had moved to Chicago, following some deadbeat who treated her like shit, and Emma had swooped in to pick up the broken pieces when he screwed her over. Though Emma couldn’t leave her sister behind, she could leave her past. Become respectable.

“If you knew what trouble I’d turn out to be, you’d never have hired me.”

“I have no regrets about hiring you. You are the best assistant I’ve ever had, and the black-and-white of that résumé can’t tell me different.”

“The real résumé might make you reconsider. Education—biker bars, honky-tonks, and pool halls. Experience—a shit-ton of bad choices with men who treated me with the same low level of respect I felt for myself.”

He held her tighter. “You don’t have to do this.”

“You wanted to know. You wanted to work out the puzzle. Skills—faking it until making it, so mobile she can up sticks at a moment’s notice, no shame whatsoever—” The volume of her voice escalated in tandem with her need to make him understand. She was unworthy of his kindness and frankly, it was killing her.

“Baby,” he soothed.

She went for the kill shot. “My sister’s in rehab and my dad’s a jailbird.”

The words hung in the air like dense weighted objects waiting to crash. Her breath hung with it. He should have frozen, pushed her away, anything but what he did.

He kissed her gently on the top of her head.

Tears welled in her eyes, and she burrowed closer into the safety of all that warm skin. He was naked, yet she was the one completely and utterly exposed.

“Is your sister’s problem related to your debt problem?”

She nodded against his shoulder. “I’m supposed to take care of her. She’s three years younger than me and all our lives, I’ve been the one who cleaned her cuts, brushed her hair, read her a bedtime story. Sang stupid songs together.”

“No momma?”

“She ran out when I was eight, and Dad was in and out of prison. We lived with my grandmother, on and off, sometimes in foster care, but mostly it was just us.”

“Mostly it was you, brave girl.”

“Not brave. Just necessary.”

He tipped her chin up to face him. “Sometimes, that’s the same thing, Emma.”

“I wasn’t always there for her and she turned wild. I wanted to be free, so I didn’t see the trouble she was in until it was too late.”

Greedy Emma had resented the motherhood thrust upon her by absent relatives and negligent foster parents. She wanted to be a crazy, irresponsible teen and Daisy had paid the price. Run with the wrong crowd, flirted with catastrophe.

“You’re not your sister’s keeper. Time to start thinking of yourself, about what you need.” Her eyes met his, stark vulnerability and undeserved affection shining from them.

“That’s what got us into trouble in the first place.”

“This pride of yours, it’s admirable as all get-out, but there has to come a point in your life where you admit you need a hand. Pain might be necessary, but suffering is optional. Are you going to let me be the fucking man here and help my woman?”

My woman. Those words seized her heart with a fierce joy. But he didn’t get it. If she accepted that money, it would always be between them. This leaden lump chaining them to her shame and debt. And Ray would want more.

“I’m not a good person, Brody. You don’t know the things I’ve done, the life I’ve led. I thought if I wore a baggy suit and styled my hair differently I could be someone else. Hide her away. But in that club, when you came in, she came back with a vengeance.” The words gushed out of her, taking every last breath of hope with them. “When you walked out of that shower, my name still fresh on your lips, this greedy bitch came out to play. I’m selfish and—”

He swallowed her protest with a kiss. “I never want to hear you speak like that about yourself. You had a tough time as a kid and you made the best of it. Before you diagnose yourself with low self-esteem, first make sure that you’re not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes. You need better-quality people in your life.”

He applied another soothing kiss to her temple. It turned her on more than if he’d made some glorious, dirty-talking demand.

“You might have screwed up, but that doesn’t make you a screwup. That résumé you just recited? Be proud. Be proud of every step you’ve taken to make your life better and stop blaming yourself for what happened in that club. You drove me crazy with desire in your unfashionable suit and your terrible hairstyle and your sensible shoes. And when I saw you with that banging body calling my name before I even knew who you were, I was already on the hook. Had been for months while I fantasized about taking you a million different ways. My body knew the score. What we did was hot and sexy, and I refuse to be ashamed of feeling that damn good. Tell me you don’t regret it.”

She deserved censure for inciting him to lose his mind, yet here he was shouldering the blame. Her whole life, she had never once thought she should be cherished this way. That she deserved to be a participant in life instead of merely an observer.

“Say it, Emma,” he whispered, the words loaded with longing. With dangerous promise. “Say you don’t regret it. You don’t regret us.”

The words stalled in her throat, refused to go the distance. She drew him to the lounger, coasted a hand over his hip, and cupped his ass, pulling him over her. Wild for the weight of him on her, needing to feel its solidity anchoring her in place. The pleasure she felt at being open to him and being seen whipped through her.