InformedConsent by Susanna Stone Page B

should stop him.
    “Hard, thorough, unrelenting. No mercy.”
    His dead calm, dead sure voice held no emotion—just the
facts, ma’am.
    “Oh.” She tore her brain apart, frantic to find some
brilliant, snappy response. “Is that what you meant?”
    Right. She was going to fire her inner scriptwriter.
    “It’s what I said , Calloway. So, yeah, it’s what I
meant. But, hey, I’ll play along.”
    He removed his fingertip from her breastbone and stepped
back and she was able to breathe again. Sort of.
    “Assuming you did somehow misunderstand the word ‘fuck’,
I’ll give you a second chance.”
    “Corbett, I’m here just to talk to you—”
    “Out of here. Now. Or the program goes ahead as outlined.”
    “You seem damned sure of your chances,” she said, striving
for a light tone.
    He raised one eyebrow. God, the man was talented.
    “You think I won’t do it?”
    “You’re not that kind of guy.” Even as she threw out the
challenge, her treacherous body throbbed for it. Her blood grew thin and flowed
fast at the prospect of his overpowering her, stripping her, spreading her
legs…
    Just as he’d promised. Threatened.
    …you have no clue how out of your depth you were the
night you tried to seduce me. Girls like you who tease men like me are asking
for trouble, and you can thank your guardian angel I stopped before I showed
you how the game of sex is really played…
    “That kind of guy…?” he challenged.
    Okay. She needed to disarm this situation. Present her case
and then walk away with her self-respect—and god knew what else—intact.
    “It’s not you. Not good old reliable Joe Corbett,
hardworking, decent, all-round nice guy.”
    “Uh-huh. You mean that nice guy who would never hold a
woman—especially not that nice, wholesome Tara Calloway who used to hang
around her dad’s workshop—up against the wall. Against her will.”
    “What, here?” She waved a would-be insouciant hand around
the veranda, as though the innocent rustic scenario of the old sleeping cabin
could provide a cloak of safety.
    But Corbett, in this time and place and mood, was clearly
anything but safe. With casual deliberation, never taking his eyes from hers,
he unbuckled the tool belt and lowered it to the floor. He shoved it aside with
his foot.
    She opened her mouth to make another attempt at the purpose
of her visit, but the surrealism of the situation simply paralyzed her throat.
The energy of Corbett’s single-minded determination snaked its way into in all
her vulnerable places. Her lower gut flamed into response.
    “Sticking around, eh?” He took one lapel of her leather
jacket between his fingers, as though inspecting the quality.
    I have to tell him why I’m here.
    But she stood paralyzed as he eased her jacket back off her
shoulders.
    “Corbett…”
    Why the hell couldn’t she just say it? Clear the air— I’m
here with a message from my father. An offer. A proposition. It has nothing to
do with you and me.
    Except her father’s assignment seemed to have plummeted out
of her consciousness. What the hell was it again…?
    He tossed the jacket unerringly to land on an old wicker
chair.
    “Then I have to assume the consent is given. Signed and sealed.”
    Corbett enclosed her wrist in his unequivocal grip that
matched the determined set to his mouth and Tara could only gasp at the
electricity short-circuiting between them.
    What had she let herself in for? How much did she really
know about this man when he became aroused? Or how much he might have changed
since that achingly lovely night when nothing happened?
    “And I guess that mythical nice guy would never do this.”
    This was to swing her around and ram her back up
against the inside wall of the veranda and jam his pelvis against hers, forcing
her back into the rough, wood siding.
    The thrust of his solid erection bore straight into her
reality, conjuring up a flash memory of that night to continue working toward
her undoing.
    A