Page 2 of Her Bad Boy

There hadn't been very many of either, but she wasn't eager to point that out to him.

"If I didn't have a healthy ego, I might have been hurt."

She didn't bother to suppress her outright snort at how preposterous either of those ideas was. He could have pretty much any woman he wanted—some in ways she thought she might not like to contemplate—and she highly doubted that anyone had the ability to hurt him in any way. It was much more likely to be the other way around.

The smile she was expecting from him didn't appear. Instead, he continued to stare at her intently before he moved again, this time leaning back against her desk right next to her chair, those long legs stretched out before him, effectively, quietly barring the most obvious escape route.

She saw his hand coming towards her long before it touched her with exquisite gentleness, but she still flinched a little when it did, and a flicker of her eyes to his caught his grimace at that, but she couldn't suppress it and wasn't in the mood to want to bother to try, either.

"You've got a nice shiner going there. How's the lip?" Try as he might, even with his considerable will, he was entirely unable to keep the edge of concern from his tone. Although he'd been released from jail less than an hour after he'd gotten there, he'd succeeded in keeping himself away from her all night, but he'd finally reached the end of his rope and now, here he was, that soft cheek in his palm, bearing the absolutely unacceptable evidence of the fact that he had failed to keep her safe.

"I'm fine, thank you, Mr. Bove," she replied primly, standing abruptly—unable to stifle a bit of a moan at doing so that had him frowning deeply. Allie made her way—somewhat less than gracefully in favor of expedience, not wanting to give him the opportunity to actually trap her there—around the other side of the desk, desperately needing to put some distance between them. "Is that why you're here? To assess the damage?"

Although she did, indeed, find respite from his nearness by standing in front of her own desk, she realized her tactical error as soon as he appropriated her chair and she felt the balance of power shift in his favor. As if it hadn't already been heavily weighted towards him from the moment they'd met.

Again, he managed to sound somewhat insulted. "I came here, Miss Barstow, to ascertain for myself that you are—indeed—all right."

Allie crossed her arms over her own chest, partly in anger, but also knowing it might help conceal at least parts of her body's highly inappropriate reactions to his proximity. "If that is true," she responded, her tone conveying the idea in no uncertain terms that she highly doubted it. "Then you can leave now, because I am, as I just said, perfectly fine."

For a long moment, he simply considered her with those disturbingly intent eyes of his, remaining annoyingly still when she couldn't manage not to tap her foot and glare at him expectantly, as if he was going to instantly obey her, when she knew full well that she was the one who was expected to obey him.

When he stood suddenly, she flinched, but refused to allow herself to t

ake a step back, even when he rounded the desk again. Allie anticipated that he was going to try to embrace her or touch her somehow, tensing in a way that hurt, but she ignored it in favor of being ready to resist him.

Instead, he walked right past her to pull the shades, so that they were instantly plunged into semi darkness, even further cut off from the rest of the world—however empty it was outside her office.

"Wha—what are you doing?" she asked, damning the tremulousness of her speech.

When he answered, he was standing directly behind her, and she would have sworn she could feel his deep, surprisingly soft voice reverberating through her entire body, lighting unwanted fires within her that she hadn't the wherewithal to put out.

"I thought that might make you feel a little bit more comfortable, since I intend to discover for myself whether or not you're telling the truth."

Allie had no illusions about just how he intended to go about doing that, and she'd already turned to face him and begun backing away as he advanced towards her. In her haste, she misjudged the placement of the furniture, causing her to back up into the desk and nearly lose her balance because of it.

Luckily, he was there to keep her from falling, but when he wrapped his sure arm around her waist to steady her, she yelped embarrassingly.

Seconds later, she found herself sitting on his lap as he occupied her desk chair, trying to ignore the look of blatant concern on his face. "I'm so sorry to have hurt you," he murmured, holding her as if she was as fragile as a bubble. "I hope you know I didn't mean to."

He sounded terribly sincere, but she couldn't resist digging, "As opposed to the times when you did intend to, you mean?"

There was that endearing blush again. "Well, every girl needs to be spanked every once in a while," he teased, blush rapidly disappearing on his cheeks and reappearing on hers as his tone lowered to an even more intimate level. "I think good girls like you need to be punished more often—and much more strictly—than naughty girls, in order to ensure that you continue to behave correctly."

Her hips rolled against him—once—of their own volition as she gasped, "Lucas!" But then she ruthlessly reined in her desires and tried to strain away, finding that—although she couldn't get away, he was in no way hurting her as he held her right where he wanted her.

He smiled mischievously. "That's much better than Mr. Bove, don't you think, although not quite as good as 'Sir'?"

Allie wasn't about to answer that. "Let me up." She pushed experimentally—and tentatively—against him, not wanting to touch him any more than she absolutely had to. She knew what lay down that road, and although her body was quite willing to run full speed down it again, the rest of her was not. Or so she kept telling herself.

He looked down at where her hands lay on his chest muscles, then up at her expectantly, saying with unmistakable quiet, "Allie."

It had only been one night, but she had learned so much about him and they had connected on such a deep, visceral level that that was all it took to make her shiver, her body harkening back to that short time-out from reality that had been those sixteen or so hours that they had spent together, and her hands left him immediately.

She had been taught that anything less than instant obedience was unacceptable and she would be made to thoroughly regret any hesitance he saw in her about doing so. Those lessons were still ingrained in her consciousness, even now.

"Good girl," he praised, and she felt herself unable to hold back the floodgates of warmth that coursed pell mell through her body at his usually hard won approval.

He began to undress her then, slowly, as if he had all the time in the world. And, as far as Lucas was concerned, he did. He would personally annihilate anyone who disturbed them. She was here with him, sitting—more docilely than he could have hoped—on his lap, obviously aroused and just as obviously reluctant about being so.

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