Page 32 of Take the Bait

“I wish I could, but I’m stuffed.”

“Now, then.”

She blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Let’s do the movie view-off now. It’s Friday night. You don’t have to log billable hours tomorrow to meet your weekly quota, do you?”

“Nah, I’m on volunteer public defense duty. I get a flat paycheck based on eighty hours of billed work per week.”

Cam rolled his eyes. “Lord, what a sweet deal. I get paid in bags of chicken feed and loaves of stale bread.”

“Yeah, but it’s great experience to work in a big city D.A.’s office. Don’t most guys in your position jump to private practice eventually and make a fortune as defense lawyers?”

His gaze shuttered instantly.

Crap. She’d said too much. She leaned forward, using her arms to shove her breasts together and practically out the top of her dress. On cue, his gaze dropped. And promptly heated up to approximately the melting point of tempered steel.

“Check, please,” he said to the waiter at his post nearby. “And if you could pack up two chocolate mousses to go, that would be great.”

He’d read her mind. If she was going to try a dessert from this exquisite French restaurant, that would be the one she chose.

She smirked to herself. Given how sharply he’d just pulled back from talking about private law firms recruiting him, she would probably have to get him liquored up and distracted before he would tell her who the owner of that raspy voice had been.

But he was practically drooling over her cleavage. How hard could it be to get some booze down him and loosen his tongue?

Mistake. She shouldn’t have thought about his tongue and the way it had moved against her lips. How it had invaded her mouth and swept inside, claiming everything in its path. How it had thrust suggestively into her wet, hot depths and all but plundered her tonsils. More hot and bothered than she cared to admit, she slid out of the booth. She jumped half out of her skin as Cam’s big hand came to rest in the small of her back, escorting her politely—and possessively—out of the restaurant.

She screeched to a stop just inside Ma Foulle’s front door. During supper, it had gotten dark, but moreover, the skies had opened up. It was not only raining outside, it was pouring. Crud. She was never going to get a cab in this deluge. And it had been bright and sunny this morning when she left for work, which meant she hadn’t grabbed an umbrella.

Resigned to morphing into a half-drowned rat the moment she stepped out onto the sidewalk, she asked Cam, “Which direction to the closest subway entrance?”

He grasped her elbow and tugged her back from the door. “Come with me.”

The guy was strong. So strong that dragging her off to the side of the lobby was effortless for him. “My car’s in the parking garage below this building. I’ll give you a lift.”

“You don’t have to do that!” Hopefully, he would mistake her alarm for gratitude.

“It’s no problem.”

“But—”

“But nothing. C’mon.”

She opened her mouth to argue. Closed it. She couldn’t come up with a single convincing reason for him not to drive her home. It was just that the idea of being alone in a car with him was daunting to her.

Granted, the booth at Ma Foulle had been very private, very dark, very intimate, and very, very romantic. How much worse could this guy’s car be? And at least he would be occupied with driving and not gazing at her with rapt attention the way he had for the past two hours.

Still. Him giving her a ride home made this whole evening feel way too much like a date.

A crack of thunder made her jump, and the rain came down even harder as the core of an impressive thunderstorm rolled in.

“I can’t in good conscience let you go out into this deluge, Dani. Not when my car is close by, indoors, and readily available. My grandmother would kill me if she found out I let a lady get drenched in the middle of a thunderstorm?—”

A flash of lightning by an immediate, deafening crash of thunder made them both jump.

“It’s not safe to be outside,” he added persuasively. “You could get hit by lightning.”

“I’m guessing the lightning will head for the hundreds of skyscrapers a whole lot taller than me,” she retorted.

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