Page 14 of Take the Bait

And if he was turning over a new leaf toward women, he couldn’t, in all fairness, hold it against her. In fact, he probably owed her recognition for how brilliant a stunt she’d pulled off, trapping him in here like this.

Of course, one good turn did deserve another.

Yes, indeed. She was a worthy opponent and fully deserving of his respect.

A sense of lightness came over him. Of rightness. This was much closer to the kind of man he wanted to be than the one who’d walked into this restroom.

Abruptly entertained as he hadn’t been in months, he checked the hallway furtively.

All clear.

He slipped out of the bathroom and commenced plotting his revenge. Respectful, but revenge.

6

Dani woke up slowly. Her head hurt and her mouth felt filled with sawdust that tasted like battery acid. Saliva was dried onto one corner of her mouth and the light coming in her tiny loft’s window was inordinately bright this morning.

Note to self: never drink martinis on an empty stomach. Ever.

Second note to self: never try to drink away her outrage at discovering she was merely a marketable sex kitten to her employer.

Also worth a footnote: getting shitfaced did not reveal what she was supposed to do about being a sex kitten hire.

She sat up, and pain sliced through her head like a buzz saw, obliterating everything in its path. And to think, she’d been sure the roiling nausea in her stomach was going to be the worst part of her hangover.

She should probably stumble into the bathroom, swallow a handful of pain relievers, and sleep off this smashing headache with its accompanying temptation to hurl.

Her entire tiny bedroom spun around her sickeningly. Great. Vertigo. That was going to help the headache and nausea, for sure.

Maybe she should just lie down and die.

Thankfully, the partners had given everyone the morning off if they had no meetings or court appearances. It was almost as if they knew the new associates would get wrecked when presented with lots of free booze and a chance to cut loose now that they’d spent a few weeks inside the WMP pressure cooker.

She eased back down to the mattress very carefully and closed her eyes.

She would think about how to deal with WMP’s blatant sexism later. When she felt like a human being again. There had to be a way to convince Cam to tell her who belonged to that raspy voice…

Vivid memory of kissing him in the ladies’ room exploded across her brain. She brushed her mouth with her fingertips, trying to erase the feel and taste of him from her lips, but it didn’t help. His body was still pressed against hers, his thigh still lodged intimately between hers, and his tongue still inside her mouth?—

Get out of my head!

That damned voice in the back of her head responded dryly, Methinks the lady doth protest too much. Admit it. You didn’t just like kissing him. You loved it.

Fine. She’d enjoyed making out with him.

But she still had to find a way to move past their kiss, to put it out of her mind once and for all. Even in her semi-blitzed state last night, she’d known it was a one-off event that could never be repeated. In the harsh light of day, it was even more imperative that she get over it and get over him.

He’d dominated her dreams last night, kissing his imaginary way across parts of her body that made her face heat up now to recall. How was she supposed to face him in court if she thought stuff like that every time she looked at him or had to speak to him?

Dang it. He could take the hungry yearnings he provoked in her and his steamy kisses and stuff them. Memory came to her, unbidden, of the way his warm breath had caressed her neck just below her ear before he’d kissed the sensitive spot. Her whole body tingled in response?—

—She pulled a pillow over her head with a groan and tried to go back to sleep.

No dice. She was firmly stuck fantasizing about plastering herself against that big, hard body again. Being swept up in his arms and carried off to a secret tryst. Not in a ladies’ room. Somewhere private and romantic. Maybe a cabin upstate or in his sleek, penthouse bachelor pad—for surely that was the kind of place he lived in. Rolling around naked with him, in a bed or not in a bed optional.

There was no escaping the fact that, as giant a jerk as he could be, he turned her on.

Which she supposed shouldn’t confuse her, given her rotten track record with men. She always had been drawn to the strongest, smartest, best-looking boy in school. And she’d always been not-quite pretty enough, not quite thin enough, and not quite popular enough to attract the attentions of the boys she’d crushed on. Her personal motto in dating had always been, Aim high, Fail hard.

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