Strike Out: Mustangs Baseball #6 by Roz Lee Read Free Book Online

flummoxed, all at the same time, and damn if her reaction wasn’t sexy.
    His cock stirred again. This time, he refused to shield his reaction. It wasn’t like she was the kid he’d first thought she was. She was a grown woman, a scientist no less. She knew the way of the world, and she had to know how men reacted to her. “What can I say? I’m a man, and you’re an attractive female.”
     
    He thinks I’m attractive?
    The thought warmed her from the inside out. She wrapped the feeling up with a mental ribbon to be examined later. She’d promised to have Royce ready in time for batting practice, and she wasn’t going to fail on her first day. Why can’t he act like nothing was wrong? Why did he have to bring his problem out into the open? As long as they both pretended not to notice then they wouldn’t have to address the issue. But, nooooo. Mr. Too Sexy to Ignore had to go and blow the lid off the proverbial pot.
    Now, his lack of control was out there, so to speak, and they’d have to deal with it before they could move on.
    The college kids she’d worked with had all the decency to pretend nothing was going on when they reacted to her touch. She’d expected reactions from the younger men, had braced herself to pretend she didn’t notice, but she’d expected someone of Royce’s age and experience to have better control over his desire. That he didn’t, thrilled her. Not that she wanted him to know how he affected her. She needed his complete cooperation, and if he got a whiff of her attraction to him, she’d lose whatever respect she might have garnered thus far.
    “Look. All I’m saying is, yesterday, you seemed to deal with me touching you just fine. Maybe if you weren’t wearing so many clothes….”
    One eyebrow rose on his handsome face. “That’s your theory? I’m wearing shorts?”
    “It’s all I’ve got.” She drummed her fingers on the desk. “If you aren’t wearing clothes, I won’t be sticking my hands inside them.”
    “Makes sense to me.”
    She tried not to look. She really did. But from the moment he hooked his thumbs into the elastic waistband and began to push his shorts down, she became incapable of not looking. The first inch revealed a line of demarcation clearer than the Mason-Dixon Line between the shaved and au natural portions of his body. The shortened arrow disappeared beneath the briefest pair of briefs she’d ever seen. He turned just a fraction, and her breath caught in her lungs.
    Holy crap! His ass was bare! “That’s a—”
    “Jock strap,” he supplied as if there wasn’t anything but some elastic straps and a scrap of fabric between her and his genitals. She watched helplessly as he cupped his package, adjusting the mass to suit him.
    His erection strained at the stretchy red fabric. As painful as she imagined his predicament to be, it couldn’t compare with what was going on inside her. Her breasts were heavy with need, her nipples aching to escape the confines of her practical cotton bra. Every nerve ending between her navel and her knees felt like they’d been hooked up to an electrical current.
    Intellectually, she understood her response was instinctive. Women were hardwired to respond to the virile, alpha male, and no one fit the bill better than the man standing before her. As much as mankind wanted to pretend they’d risen above their baser instincts, the two of them were proof that nothing had changed since the dawn of man.
    Intellect didn’t have a chance against primal instinct. She should write a paper on the subject, but doing so would set the women’s movement back several centuries and kill her respectability in the scientific world, so she’d keep her observations to herself.
    Royce straightened, wadded his shorts into a ball, and tossed them NBA-style toward his duffle bag. “Two points!”
    His exclamation snapped her out of her lust-fueled haze. Damn the man for looking the way he did. How was she supposed to function with him