Page 25 of Fergus

She was momentarily distracted by the fact Fergus was still wearing the jeans and thin green sweater he had changed into earlier before cooking their dinner.

The latter clung to his wide chest and muscular shoulders, the sleeves of the sweater pushed up to just below his elbows. His dark blue jeans molded to the contour of his waist and hips.

As Thea had thought might be the case, he looked even sexier in casual clothing, with his hair tousled as if he had been running his hands through it, than he did in a suit. And he was breathtaking in a suit.

“Did you mean it?” Fergus finally prompted. “That you’re curious about—about?—”

“Having my bottom caressed and then bitten?” she finished ruefully. “Well, it’s something to think about, at least.”

He winced. “But not something you’re interested in ever becoming a reality?”

She gave a smile at how telling his deliberately casual tone was: her answer mattered to him. “What are you going to do with it after you’ve bitten it?”

“Kiss it better,” he came back instantly.

Thea couldn’t help but chuckle at the raw honesty of his answer, even as a thrill of anticipation coursed through her. “That sounds…intriguing.”

“In a good way or a bad way?”

“I won’t really know until after the deed is done,” she came back ruefully.

Fergus stilled, eyeing her warily. As if she were an unexploded bomb that might blow up in his face.

Maybe she was?

Because Thea’s physical response to Fergus—her nipples were engorged and visibly poking against the silk material of her camisole, and the wet heat between her thighs was dampening her sleep shorts—was way off the charts to anything she had ever felt for any other man.

Martin was twenty-seven, and he seemed like nothing but a boy compared to the inborn self-confidence and experience Fergus exuded without even thinking about it.

Probably because hewasself-confident and experienced!

Whereas Thea was…well, neither of those things.

Oh, she had the self-confidence to be able to do her job. To be any other way when teaching teenagers would have had those pupils reducing her to nothing more than a blubbering mess crying in the corner of the classroom. Kids weren’t just cruel in the face of weakness, they could be heartless.

Her private life was something else entirely.

Maybe it was all those years of having her needs and desires ignored by her mother, more so than ever after her father died. Or perhaps it was that Martin had been the last in a long line of men whose interest in her had ultimately proven to be less than genuine once he discovered who her stepfather was and how wealthy her mother was because of that marriage.

Some of the men she had dated had run after discovering her connection to Andrei Yegorov. Others, like Martin, ultimately showed they were only interested in the wealth the Russian oligarch represented.

Fergus had made it obvious he had no interest in Andrei’s money. He also knew exactly who Andrei was in her life, and Lev, and most especially her mother, and he had still kissed her and wanted to bite her arse.

He had sounded less than happy about that when he spoke to his brother, not just because of who she was, but because he sounded troubled by the attraction he felt to a woman so much younger than him.

As if that mattered.

Magnus was right. If the attraction was there, then age became inconsequential.

If that was true, how did she go about letting Fergus know that was how she felt?

Considering the reason the two of them had met ten years ago, however briefly, honesty was probably her best policy.

* * *

“Does your head still hurt?”Fergus prompted guardedly when the silence between them had become too charged for his comfort. “Do I need to call?—”

“No, my head doesn’t still hurt,” she said, cutting him off. “But I do have an ache.” Her golden gaze remained steady on his.

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