“Not at all,” she murmured, suddenly all charm. “I had trouble with my zipper. You can’t imagine how worried I was you might get tired of waiting and leave.”
“Trouble with your zipper? For over an hour?”
“It’s a long zipper.”
He leaned away to look pointedly at the back of her dress. A delicate triad of beaded straps criss-crossed at her shoulders. Her skin was left bare all the way to just below her waist. The sparkling fabric molded to her bottom before falling in a straight line to the floor. Just over the crest of her bottom he could see the faint outline of the zipper hidden in the seam. It couldn’t have been more than four inches long.
“So I see.”
Kitty was no scrawny fashion model. She had a body that managed to be both slender and voluptuous. Her bottom was lusciously rounded. Just looking at it made his blood throb with lust.
She elbowed him in a way that was both playful and seductive. “Stop looking at my zipper,” she murmured huskily as she locked her door.
He shrugged as they started down the stairs. “If you don’t want people looking at your zipper, you shouldn’t display it quite so prominently.”
“That’s sexist,” she chided.
“No, it would be sexist if we were at work and I ordered you to display your zipper. Or I hired you or fired you based on the size of your zipper. But this is a social situation, so I don’t think either of those apply. Besides, a woman doesn’t wear a dress like that unless she wants to be looked at.”
He hailed a cab when they reached the street.
Kitty frowned, her bottom lip jutting forward in a pout. “Oh. We’re going in a cab. How … prosaic.”
“I try to avoid hiring a driver when I come to the city. They spend too much time looking for parking and driving around. It’s a waste of gas and resources.” He held open the cab door for her, admiring the swath of leg revealed as she slid into the car.
“Hmm. Like I said. How prosaic.”
He climbed in beside her. “Being aware of the environment isn’t prosaic.” A hint of his annoyance slipped into his tone. “FMJ has made most of its money in green industries. Our image as a green company is a priority. Not just for the company, but for all of us.”
She yawned delicately, but with obvious boredom. Annoyed by her attitude, he nearly called her on it, but before he could, it hit him. “You’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you?”
She looked taken aback. “I … I don’t know what you mean. Doing what?”
“This.” He gestured toward her body-skimming dress. “The sexpot dress. The self-indulgent pout. The childish behavior. It’s all a way of keeping me off balance.”
She blinked, and he couldn’t tell if he’d insulted her or if she was merely surprised he’d seen through her. “You’re just trying to distract me. To avoid that conversation we need to have.”
“However did you get that idea?”
“Probably because you’ve been pushing me away ever since I walked into the conference room today. You’ve made it obvious that you don’t want to relinquish control of Biedermann’s. You may have fooled everyone else into thinking that’s the only thing going on. But I can see right through you. I know the truth.”
Oh, God. What did he mean? He knew the truth? What truth? That she was a total fraud? That she had no idea what she was doing?
He leaned closer, a seductive grin on his face. “I know what you’re really afraid of.”
“Afraid of?” she squeaked.
He brushed his thumb across her lower lip, once again sparking the desire that heated her blood every time he touched her.
She should not be attracted to him. He was so not what she needed right now. Or ever, for that matter. Geesh, he wasn’t even wearing a tux. Okay, so he looked fabulous in an Armani jacket thrown over a gray cashmere sweater and black pants. And, yes, the understated elegance of his outfit made him look outrageously masculine. Never mind that he carried it off. Never mind that the day’s worth of stubble on his jaw made her fingertips tingle with the urge to touch him. Never mind that she could tell already all the other men at the fundraiser would look overdressed and foppish by comparison. She couldn’t possibly be attracted to a man who didn’t even know when to wear a tie.
“Yes,” he continued. “You’re afraid of the attraction between us.”
As his words registered, she was flooded with an odd sense of relief. He was still talking about sex. About what had happened between them in Texas.
Maybe it shouldn’t have made her feel better, but somehow it did. Physical intimacy she could handle. Men had been pursuing her since she hit puberty. She knew how to handle that. She knew how to entice without promising anything. To lure and manipulate a man while staying just out of his reach.
What she didn’t know was how to handle a man who was interested in her. Not her body. Not her net worth, but her.
Thank God, Ford was proving no different than any other man she’d ever met. She’d learned long ago the secret to keeping men at arm’s length.
The mere suggestion of sex was enough to distract the average man. The possibility that you might one day have sex with him made most men so befuddled they never bothered to look beneath the surface.
To that end, she let herself sway toward him slightly, as if she couldn’t resist his draw. Then she ran her tongue over the spot on her lip that he’d touched. It was a gesture sure to entice him, but she found it disconcertingly intimate. She could almost taste him on her tongue.
Suddenly memories flooded her of their one night together. How could she have forgotten what it had been like to kiss him? To feel his hands on her body? To give herself over so completely to his touch?
She felt her breath catch in her chest, found herself leaning toward him, not in a calculated way, but as if he were a magnet and the heart pounding away in her chest were made of iron, pulling her inexorably toward him.
He cleared his throat, breaking the spell he seemed to have cast over her. Nodding toward the cab door on her side, he said, “We’re here.”
When had that happened? Damn him. She was supposed to be distracting him. Not the other way around.
Feeling befuddled, she looked from him to the crowded street outside her window, to the cab driver rattling off the fare. Her mind was embarrassingly sluggish, but finally she got moving.
Staying one step ahead of Ford was going to be harder than she’d thought. This was going to take some serious work.
Then just when it seemed like things couldn’t get any worse, a camera flashed a few feet away. Great. Just what she needed.
Paparazzi.
Four
Ford stood near the bar, nursing a tumbler of weak Scotch, wishing he could have ordered himself a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. He would have thought that at five hundred bucks a ticket, they could have stocked the bar with some decent beer. But of course, the best beer in the world wouldn’t have distracted him from what was really bothering him. His date.
From the moment the first camera had flashed outside the hotel and she’d practically leaped from his side, she’d been avoiding him. At first, he’d assumed she just didn’t want their picture taken together. That she was averting the potential scandal. But things hadn’t improved since they’d made it into the event. She’d immediately sent him off to get her a glass of white wine and she’d been dodging him ever since. Not that he wasn’t having a grand ol’ time, between the event organizer who’d hit him up for a ten-thousand-dollar