Page 27 of Up In Smoke

She sighed at him then her lips pressed flat with anger. “I know you didn't mean it that way, but you don't know anything about it.”

Didn't he?She’d told him last night. “I just meant you always look so proper.” He had held back the wordprimand gave himself a pat on the back for it. “When you were wearing Jo’s clothes. It just …” he searched for the proper term. “It suited you.”

He couldn't go wrong with that, could he? But he must have.

She turned around and stared at him. “What would you have me do?”

Shit.

He tried. He really did. “You never wear jeans.”

He liked her in jeans! If he was going to step in it, he might as well jump in the puddle with both feet and make a splash. He didn't want to say,You don't wear anything sexy.But her expression hardened and she stared at him.

“Really, you think I should loosen up?”

There was nothing he could say. He'd come over unannounced, eaten the food she prepared for herself. And now he'd managed to completely insult her.

She was not going to go out with him now and let him buy her a beer.

But even as he was thinking his way through all of that, she said, “Have you ever done coke off a hooker’s ass, Luke? Because I have!”

He knew there was no way to hide his expression. Just in case the things she'd said before weren't shocking enough, she’d tossed another grenade at him and he wasn’t catching it well. She'dWhat?

“When I left my family and went out on my own, I got a job waiting tables. And I was good at it. So I moved to fancier and fancier restaurants, where I began partying afterwards with the patrons. I've done all kinds of drugs, Luke.”

He blinked at her.

She had had the grace to say, “No. I’m not an addict. Unlike your brother, I just don’t have—” she raised her fingers for air quotes “—an addictive personality.”

When he didn’t speak, she went on, lobbing her stories at him like lit sticks of TNT. “And thank God, because I triedeverything.” She sucked in a deep breath as she mistook his concern for disapproval, her lips flattening again. “How exactly should I loosen up? Should I fuck my way around town? Should I get some tattoos, Luke? Well, you’re too late for either of those!”

One hand reached up to the back of her neck, and then quickly her arms crossed, grabbing at the hem of the pretty silk shell she wore. She twisted her back to him as she stripped it, revealing a twine of inked Ivy and Lilies that snaked across one shoulder and down her side. Black ink scrolled through it as did tiny words he couldn’t make out.

But she was reaching to the front of the silk pants and unbuttoning them, pulling one side down, revealing more ink: crossed swords on a tantalizing hip bone. And as she boldly faced him—the shell discarded on the kitchen counter behind her—in only a white lace bra, he saw another tattoo on her breast. This one snuck down under the edge of her bra.

It hadn't been disapproval that she'd seen and now he couldn’t even form words to tell her she’d been wrong. He had no way to fight her anger and tell her she didn’t need it.

He didn’t have any issues with any of it.

It was bold and sexy and unexpected. And his whole body clenched at the idea that Ivy Dean was hiding this from everyone … except him.

What he did next would change everything.

Chapter Twenty-One

In a moment of pure fantasy, Luke leaned in.

Ivy was mad at him. She might be standing there in her bra, demanding that he see her tattoos and understand that she wasn’t the prim, buttoned-up librarian she might appear. She demanded that he see her as she was … and he was noticing.

He hadn’t flirted with her. He didn’t sweet talk her. He didn’t brush her lips lightly with his and try to coax her into a kiss or something more. He simply lost his damned mind and sank right into it. Into her.

The kiss was fierce and demanding from the first touch.

She didn’t quite trust him, he knew. He’d almost gotten her killed.

He didn’t quite trust her either. She had the tools to destroy his family with a few well placed rumors.

But he wanted her. His hips ground into hers, finding the rolling sensation of her moving against him as a reward. Her fingers were wound tightly into his hair, holding his head so she could ravage his mouth. Luke was more than willing to be her victim.

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