She sighed, looking out over the pond now directly in her line of vision, so she didn’t have to look at him.
“Josette, we need to talk.”
“I thought we already were.”
“I mean about us.”
“Us?” she asked faintly.
“What happened in the hall can’t happen again.”
“I can’t promise that.” He was a pretty irritating guy at times and got to her like nobody else.
She wasn’t sure she could always control her temper around him. It was strange, because before meeting Nitro, she’d never really thought she had a temper.
He said something nasty, and she flinched. She’d heard men swearing around her all her life, but nobody had Nitro’s coldly controlled tone of voice.
“Sorry,” he grumbled.
“For what?”
“Hotwire says I shouldn’t curse around you since you aren’t a soldier anymore.”
“I don’t understand. Why?”
“According to his mother, it isn’t right to swear around a woman.”
She’d heard that, but she still didn’t get the distinction of then versus now. “I was a woman when I was a soldier.” Heck, she was still a soldier…in all the ways that counted. Would that ever change?
“Too much of one.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“So, Hotwire told you to watch your mouth?”
“Yeah.”
“When did you talk to him?”
“While you were napping.”
“Oh. I would have liked to talk to him, too.”
“There was no need.” Nitro sounded awfully surly about it.
“I guess not. That’s sweet how he told you not to swear around me.” She smiled. She could just imagine how well the instruction had gone over with Nitro. “But don’t worry about it. I don’t expect you to change just for me.”
“I can be as polite as the next guy.”
She’d never noticed him wanting to. “Whatever you say.”
“I can damn well stop swearing around you if I say I will.”
She couldn’t help it; she burst out laughing. “Yes, I’m sure you damn well can…,” she wheezed out between bouts of laughter.
Taking a sideways peek up at him, she saw burnished red along his cheekbones. It made her laugh all the harder. The prospect of Nitro blushing was just too much for her funny bone.
“If you can stop imitating a hyena, we can finish our discussion,” he said with freezing cool.
After several deep breaths, she managed to stifle her mirth. “I don’t know what else there is to say. You want me to promise something impossible.”
“It would help if you’d wear looser clothes and more of them.”
How was that going to help her temper? “My clothes aren’t too tight.”
“Your jeans outline your sexy little rear perfectly, and if you’re wearing a bra under that shirt, I’ll chew boot leather for dinner.”
She gasped, shocked he’d noticed her lack of a bra. She hated wearing them, and because she was small she didn’t have to. “I’m not that big. I don’t wear one most of the time.”
“I noticed.” He sounded aggrieved.
“Oh.” Her breasts tingled at the thought of him looking close enough to notice. She knew he was observant, but he had to have really focused in on her to discern that detail.
He stopped and glared down at her. “And it doesn’t help.”
“Help what? What exactly are we talking about here?”
“Me surviving another bout of close proximity to you on a mission.”
“My lack of a bra is going to hurt you?”
“It already has.”
“What? You don’t look wounded to me.”
“That’s because you’re not looking in the right place.”
When her gaze dropped to where he was indicating, heat zoomed into her cheeks. She lifted her head to focus on his face again immediately, but the damage to her equilibrium had been done.
“I’m supposed to be walking off my sexual tension,” he growled, “but instead all I can think is getting you alone somewhere and touching your breasts, tasting them until you almost come from the stimulation and then burying myself in you so deep, my dick will finally stop hurting.”
She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t speak. Couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You want me?”
“Don’t sound so surprised. I’d say your effect on me is pretty obvious. If not, just what did you think caused my hard-on?”
“You said…”
“That you turned me on.”
Several things clicked into place. Things she probably should have taken into account already, but she was so ignorant of men. On top of her own ignorance was Nitro’s confusing behavior. He acted angry with her half the time, not like a man who wanted her.
“You mean every time you get hard around me, I turn you on?”
His expression said that should be obvious even to her. “Yes.”
“Oh.”
“Are you saying you didn’t know?”
“Men can get hard reading an ad for hot tubs in the Yellow Pages.”
“I’m not one of them. Unless I was thinking of you in a hot tub.”
Her jaw dropped, and her heart started galloping like the winning horse at the Kentucky Derby. Because he got hard around her a lot. He’d been that way on the mission with Wolf and Lise. She’d thought it was just his natural virility.
“I thought you were always like that.”
“Hard?”
“Yes.”
“Only around you.”
That couldn’t be true. “You’re always mad at me.”
“I’m always lusting after you. Can’t you tell the difference?”
“No. I thought you didn’t like me.”
“I wanted you.”
“Wolf doesn’t act like he hates Lise.”
“Lise is sleeping with him.”
“Oh.”
“Stop saying that.”
“I don’t know what else to say.”
“I don’t mean to act like I hate you,” he said through gritted teeth.
She could be pardoned for questioning his sincerity. “Really? A man can want a woman without liking her.”
“Yeah, he can, but I do like you.”
She looked down at the ground, comparing the size of his big feet to her smaller ones. “You said not other women…”
“Yeah.”