Made for Sin by Stacia Kane Read Free Book Online

“Your place isn’t what I expected.”
    “Oh?” The bottle still stood on his desk, behind and slightly to the right of where she’d resumed her lean. He headed for it and reached out to grab it, realizing too late that the movement placed him right in front of her. Close to her. That perfume she wore was going to drive him crazy. So was the way her breath caught, just a tiny, almost-unnoticeable hitch when his arm started to curve around her. That sound was going to keep him from falling asleep for a while, he imagined. Or maybe it was more accurate to say it was going to keep him up.
    Okay, that kind of thinking was going to get him nowhere. More alcohol was what he needed. He yanked both the bottle and himself away from her, as smoothly as possible.
    Her voice sounded like she was trying to be smooth, too. “It’s not very seductive.”
    “What?” Glass clinked against glass. Jesus, he felt like an idiot. And probably looked like an idiot, unable to keep the bottle steady as he poured.
    “Seductive. Like, used to seduce people and—”
    “I know what it means,” he said. “I just don’t know why you’re talking about it.”
    That cool, evaluating look again. “Your place. I’d expected it to be different. More…more pickup artist, I guess. Given how many women you—”
    “Okay.” Fuck this. His temper flared; he turned to face her again and set the bottle and his glass on the desk with two decisive slams. If she wanted him to be a sleazeball, he could be a sleazeball. And if she wanted to be smug and superior, well, maybe she’d learn there was at least one thing she’d never be able to best him at. “Enough of this. You want to tell me why you’re so fixated on how many women I sleep with? Why it matters to you so much?”
    She opened her mouth, but he wasn’t in the mood to let her talk yet. The beast was definitely not in the mood to let her talk; it started growling with pleasure when he advanced on her, invading her personal space enough that she had to lean her head back to look at him. Good. Her eyes widened when they met his, and that was good, too.
    He plucked a lock of soft, shining hair off her shoulder, caressing it between his fingers as he lowered his voice and injected a confidential, just-between-us tone to it. “Do you want to be one of them, is that it? Are you wondering just how good I am? Have I wounded you somehow by not trying to get you into my bed?”
    He leaned in even closer, forcing her to tilt her head back and to the side to make room for his. Her pulse raced in her throat. The beast could hear it, and he could see it. He let his lips barely—barely—brush her earlobe as he said, in a tone that was almost a whisper, “Don’t take it personally, sweetheart. You’re just not my type.”
    Lie. That was a huge damned lie. That was the kind of lie they called congressional hearings to investigate, it was so big.
    For a long moment she didn’t move, so long he almost started to feel bad. Then she pushed his hand away. The suspiciously dazed look in her eyes disappeared. “Hardly. I just don’t like working with little-boy men who treat women like cheap toys. And I don’t trust people whose lives revolve around anonymous sex and have never had an actual relationship. Is it your hatred of women that keeps you single at an age where normal men have at least lived with someone, or are you defective in some other way that ought to worry me, if I’m trusting you?”
    That hurt, a deep pain right in what was left of his soul. Did she think he
wanted
to be alone, to never have someone to call his own, to never look into a woman’s eyes and see that he was important to her? Loved by her? Did she think he wanted to spend his life sinning with random women, being just another notch on their belts and having them be the same to him? Did she think he was proud of it?
    The words started to form on his lips. He almost said them. But then he realized, of course she did. Of