Page 40 of The Price of Scandal

“Just doing a quick inventory,” I said without turning around. “I’ll be out in a minute.” A brisk brush-off that anyone tuned to human nature would read to mean “Leave, now.”

He closed the door, but I could still sense him in the room with me. My acute awareness of his presence was yet another annoyance.

I felt hands on my shoulders, and then he was turning me to face him. Manhandling was something I did not tolerate. But rather than kicking him in the spectacular junk, I studied the tips of my shoes.

I was puttering around a lab in open-toed stilettos. I was an embarrassment to scientists everywhere.

“Emily,” he said again, nudging my chin up with an arrogant thumb.

I met his gaze with hostility. I hated being anything in the neighborhood of vulnerable. And being vulnerable in front of a man I’d known for less than twenty-four hours? Well, that was unheard of. An impossibility. A rogue data point that would be ruthlessly stripped of significance.

“What? Why are you here?” My voice was cool, clipped.

“That was fucking amazing. You dazzle me,” he said, running his hands down the sleeves of my lab coat.

I felt my eyebrows wing up.Uh-oh.“I beg your pardon?” I said stiffly.

“I’m going to cross a professional line here,” he warned me. “It’s your fault because that in there was like witnessing a miracle.”

“Cross a professional line? You?” I scoffed, more nervous than I cared to admit. I’d handled unwanted advances with a frosty efficiency before. But this felt… different. “Are you breaking into my house and taking a bath again?”

“No. I’m going to kiss you right here in this science closet.”

“It’s a storage room, not a science closet. And no. You’re not,” I said, hands flying to his chest. There went my frosty efficiency.

“Afraid I am. And I’d apologize, but we both know I’m not going to really be sorry.”

He was leaning in. My body, already revved from scientific achievement, happily threw itself into overdrive. His chest, firm and toned, pressed into my palms, testing my resistance.

“I don’t know you,” I said quietly as his mouth moved closer. I didn’t kiss strangers. Certainly not strangers who trespassed and stole.God,what would he take from me?

My heart beat out a tempo loud enough that I was sure he could hear it.

“I’m starting to know you, and I quite like it,” he countered.

I was wearing a lab coat with my “librarian bun” as Jane liked to call it, and the sexiest man I’d ever laid eyes on was putting the moves on me. My brain scrambled to rationalize.

He’s using you.

He wants something from you.

He’ll hurt you.

He’s not right for you.

“You can slap me after, I promise,” he said just before his lips brushed mine.

Oh, those lips. Firm, demanding, insistent.

Biology took over. And not the knee-jerk self-defense kind. It was an instant chemical reaction.

“Dazzled,” he whispered the word again, his mouth moving over mine. And then it was me who was dazzled.

I heard the thrum of my blood as it pumped through my veins. I tried to stay still. To be impassive. I couldn’t allow him to think that it was acceptable to kiss me like this.

But, oh, it was.

Even my stomach stopped the acrobatic act it had been performing for the last hour and went warm and liquid.