Brazilian's Nine Months' Notice (14 page)

‘Does it matter?'

Right now? God, he had a point. He could tell her his name was Jack the Ripper and she'd have trouble caring. But still...

‘I should go home,' she managed to say, trying to remember the good girl she always figured she was and the plan she'd had—something about a taxi and a bottle of Riesling in the fridge and a cheating cousin she wanted to forget about—but she was having trouble remembering the details and wasn't that a revelation?

Wasn't that what tonight was supposed to be all about—forgetting?

He pulled away, letting her go even though the distance between them was scant inches. Even now her body swayed into the vacuum where his had so recently been. ‘Is that what you want? To go home?'

She saw the tightness in his shadowed features as if it was physically hurting him to hold himself back, she felt the heat rising from his strong body and she knew what it must be costing him to leave her to decide when the power in his strong limbs told her that he was powerful enough to take whatever he wanted. The concept was strangely thrilling. The perfect stranger. Powerful, potentially dangerous, but giving her the choice.

A choice never so starkly laid out in her mind.

A choice between being responsible and playing it safe and going home and sitting stewing about what she'd missed, or being reckless for once in her life and taking what was on offer—one night with a man whose touch promised to make her forget all the things she'd wanted to forget. One night with a stranger. Her cousin would be horrified, and right now wasn't that good enough reason in itself?

Besides, all her life she'd played it safe, and where had that got her? Nowhere. She'd done nothing wrong and yet she'd lost more today than she'd ever thought possible.

Tonight was no night to play it safe.

‘No,' she said, her tongue tasting an unfamiliar boldness on her lips. ‘I want to spend the night with you.'

‘One night,' he said, and she recognised it as a warning. ‘That's all I can offer you.'

‘Perfect,' she said with a smile because that was all she wanted. ‘One night is all I want.' Tomorrow she could pick up the shattered pieces of her promises and work out where she went from there.

His eyes glinted in the street lighting, a flash of victory that came with a spark of heat, and he reached out his fingers to push a wayward tendril of her hair behind her ear, making her skin tingle. ‘My name is Rashid.'

‘Tora,' she said, even as she trembled under his touch.

He took her hand and brought it to his mouth, pressing it to his lips. ‘Come, Tora,' he said.

Copyright © 2015 by Trish Morey

ISBN-13: 9781460386545

Brazilian's Nine Months' Notice

Copyright © 2015 by Susan Stephens

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