Gripping her wrists, he pinned her tight to the vanity. “That sex as a weapon thing can only get you so far, Tess.”Wanna bet? “I’m not damaged, cowboy. I don’t have hang-ups about my body, I don’t use sex to mask my problems”—much—“and right now, if you don’t touch me in some very hot, very wet places, I might die.

Staying level with Tess was going to require fast thinking, which was mighty difficult considering all the blood he needed for said thought processes was now hurtling south.“What would this job involve?”“Only one task. Make. Me. Believe.”“That I’m your fiancé?”Cue her smile, sly and sexy. First time she’d let him in on that action, too. “That you want me more than your next breath.”If she moved forward a couple of inches, his boner would make her believe.

I could just as easily have taken the train.”He shut his eyes, just long enough for a movie of a Tess-induced train riot to screen on the backs of his eyelids. Fists flying, teeth broken, friendships destroyed as men vied to get closer to her lush body barely covered in that incendiary French maid outfit. And now he was turning hard again.

An inappropriate attraction to your friend’s fiancé was grounds for disbarment from the Woman Club. Neither did it make a lick of sense. He was uncouth, uneducated, uncivilized. All of their conversations back then had been unholy bicker fests where they charged from the opposite ends of the spectrum, determined not to meet in the middle but to rip pieces out of each other on the drive by.

But that kiss did more than turn her into a puddle of lust. It terrified her. Not because of how soul-searingly good it was, but because kisses like that don’t just happen. Kisses like that implied history and connection and bone-deep knowledge, and it made her question everything that had existed between them before.