Aiesha wanted him so badly she could feel it writhing and coiling like a serpent inside her. Had she ever wanted a man more than James Challender? He was the ultimate prize. Rich, powerful, well-to-do. She had always wanted him. From the first moment she had met him when he came to visit his parents soon after she had come to stay she had felt a lightning flash of awareness arc between them. He had kept a respectful distance, making it abundantly clear he was not going to be seduced by a teenager. He hadn’t been rude to her or cruel. He had been polite but firm. Implacable. And back then she had hated him for it.
Now...now she wasn’t quite so sure what she felt other than rip-roaring lust.
She wanted him because he represented everything she had missed out on during her harrowing childhood. Success. Stability. Safety.
She made a move for his belt buckle but he stalled her hand, holding it against him as he fought to control his breathing.
‘No,’ he said.
No?
What man had ever said no to her? Ever since she was a kid she’d been fighting them off. Rejecting them, not them rejecting her. The shift in power was new and troubling...unsettling. She liked to be the one who said yay or nay. ‘You want me.’ She said it matter-of-factly. Without emotion.
He released her hand and stepped back from her. ‘This can’t go anywhere.’ He pushed his hair back over his forehead. ‘You know it can’t.’
Aiesha hid behind her mask of brash bad girl. ‘Too rough for your upmarket taste?’
His frown carved deeply into his brow as he moved away to the door to leave. ‘I think it’s best if we keep things on a platonic basis. It’s...safer that way.’
She cocked one of her eyebrows at him in a cheeky manner. ‘So we’re friends now instead of enemies?’
He turned and looked back at her for a long moment. ‘I suspect your only enemy, Aiesha, is yourself.’ He punctuated his comment with a brisk dismissive nod and closed the door before she could think of a comeback.
CHAPTER FIVE
JAMES CLOSED HIS bedroom door with a self-recriminating curse. Are you crazy? Kissing her? Touching her? Wanting her? He pushed a hand through his hair in distraction. He should never have kissed her. He’d crossed the line. The line he’d put down a decade ago.
Aiesha was cunning and clever. For a moment there he’d sensed a softening in her. Her guard had slipped, or so he’d thought. But she knew exactly what she was doing. Which buttons of his to press. She wasn’t the emotionally vulnerable type. She was too hard-boiled, too street smart. Hadn’t her punch proved that?
He grimaced as he checked his reflection in the mirror of his en-suite bathroom. His nose wasn’t broken but he was going to have a black eye for sure, all because he had come too close to her without her knowing.
He rubbed at the stubble on his jaw. She’d been soundly asleep; there was no way he had got that wrong. Her breathing had been deep and even, her whole body relaxed. Her reaction had been so extreme, so unexpected. Why?
He thought about her background...trying to recall what his mother had told him about her in the past. Aiesha had been vague about her family of origin; the only thing she’d told his mother was that she was a teenage runaway and it had been her choice to leave. She hadn’t been with his family long enough to prise out any other details. As far as he knew, she hadn’t been into drugs or heavily into alcohol, or at least not that he had noticed. She only had one tattoo, and a small one at that, on the underside of her right wrist—the name Archie with hearts and roses—but she had never said who Archie was or why he was so important to her that she’d felt compelled to have his name permanently inked into her skin.
James cursed again. Kissing her had been a mistake. A big mistake. A ginormous mistake. He’d known it but done it anyway. He hadn’t been able to stop himself. As soon as she had put her hand so gently on his face he’d known he was going to kiss her. It had been inevitable. A force outside his control. He’d only planned to press his mouth to hers as an experiment, as a test for himself. To prove he could do it without losing his head.
For years he had dreamed of kissing that mouth. He had fantasised about it. Hungered for it like a former addict did a forbidden drug. Her mouth was as addictive as he’d imagined it—soft and sweet and yet hot and hungry. The blood had surged through him at rocket-force speed. Her deliciously feminine body had felt so...so right as he’d held her in his arms. The way her mouth had tasted, the way her tongue had danced with his in that sexy tango, the way her hips had been in the perfect position against his. He’d wanted her so badly he’d had to fight to keep his hands in one place so he didn’t use them to tear the clothes from her body and ram himself into her wickedly tempting wetness.