Читать книгу Double Exposure - Erin McCarthy, Erin McCarthy - Страница 9

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KYLE FORGOT WHATEVER stupid crack he had been about to make about feeling green. He forgot that the paint covering him from head to toe was cold and itchy. He forgot everything.

Because Emma Gideon, his extremely businesslike and uptight coworker, had just taken off her bra, revealing a pair of perfect C-cup breasts, their tight rosy nipples winking at him. He hadn’t thought she would go through with it. It didn’t fit what he had seen of her personality, and he couldn’t say he really blamed her for not wanting to participate. There was more to show for a chick than for him. He was just in his underwear, no big deal. Hell, he took his garbage to the curb in his boxer briefs. But given the male obsession with breasts, he could fully understand why a woman might hesitate to expose hers in a tent with a few hundred people.

But he was oh so glad Emma had, because she had just given him fodder for a thousand fantasies. Not to mention it had answered the pressing question that had plagued him at work for the past several weeks: Was that perfect shape created by a push-up bra or was it all Emma?

It was Emma. No doubt about it.

The bra had just been a boulder holder, not the creator of the magnificent cleavage she tried to cover up with thin sweaters.

Aware that he was beyond the acceptable span of time for not speaking, he forced himself to tear his eyes off her breasts, concentrating on her hand, where the red bra she had discarded dangled perilously from her thumb. He couldn’t quite bring himself to look up into her eyes, knowing she would recognize the jackrabbit lust written all over his face.

“So you’re going for it,” he forced himself to say, hopefully cheerfully. “Cool. It will be fun.” God, he sounded like an idiot. But he was getting desperate because her fingers were now undoing the snap on her jeans, and he was standing only in his skivvies. Green paint may cover up a freckle, but it couldn’t do a damn thing to mask a giant boner.

He should look away. He really should look away. But that zipper was moving down now, inch by glorious inch, and he was drawn to it like a fly to honey. Really sexy honey. He couldn’t look away. Not when Emma was the only woman at the paper who had never shown an ounce of interest in him. Had never shown an ounce of interest in men or sex, period.

This could be his only chance to ever see what delights she was hiding, and while he wrestled with his conscience, at the same time he wanted desperately to catch a tiny glimpse of her forbidden fruit. A scrap of white lace was bared to him and he instantly changed his mind. Time to look away. There would be no hiding his reaction if he saw any more skin, or gave himself any more time to contemplate the soft folds hidden behind that semisheer lace, or thought about the various parts of him that could sink into that very soft, moist part of her.

He looked up, but got halted en route to her face at her chest when she started to peel down her jeans and her breasts bounced from the effort. Jesus. He was trying, damn it. But it was like laying a feast in front of a starving man. His mouth actually watered. As for the fears of tenting his briefs? They were most definitely realized. He had an erection the size of the Sears Tower.

Then Emma bent over, which put her face in close proximity to that erection, and she shoved her pants past her luscious hips. He was not going to think about what could be happening in this same position under different circumstances. Kyle went to shove his hands into his pockets to prevent himself from touching her, only to remember he had no pockets.

Emma made a small sound of distress as she lost her balance trying to withdraw her foot from her jeans, and Kyle reached out and grabbed her so she didn’t fall in a heap of denim and bouncing breasts. Though he would have enjoyed the view. But he wasn’t sick enough to want her injured so he could have middle school fantasies.

“Thanks,” she breathed, glancing up at him, her amber-colored eyes hooded. He couldn’t read her expression.

Emma stood and clutched her jeans to her chest, covering her breasts. The pants, shirt, bra and plastic bag covered the majority of her bare skin. The majority of the good parts, anyway. Kyle was simultaneously relieved and disappointed.

“Here, stand in front of me until you get sprayed. I’ll block you from view,” he told her, because it was clear she wasn’t comfortable with her nudity. Her cheeks were pink and she had inched closer to him, farther from the room at large.

If she was going to go through with this, he wanted to help her. He wanted her to trust him. And now that he thought about it, he didn’t particularly want just any guy in the room to have the same view he’d had of her breasts.

Her eyes narrowed. “What’s the catch?”

He held his hands up. “None, I promise. I’m just trying to be a nice guy. So sue me.” He was being a friggin’ Boy Scout here, with his eyes trained on her face, and she was sure he had an angle? He was insulted.

“I’m just making sure I’m not about to become a punch line.”

“What kind of a-hole do you take me for?” Kyle moved around behind her and glowered at a guy he suspected of checking out Emma’s butt in her—dear God—bikini panties. It wasn’t a G-string. It covered her cheeks, but not much else. And those were some perfectly curved, smooth ass cheeks. No wonder the guy was staring. Kyle swallowed hard and crossed his green arms over each other, knowing his shoulders and hips were broad enough to block a good portion of Emma. He’d played hockey in high school and he’d kept up with his weight training. There were no skinny jeans in his future and he wasn’t afraid to play the muscle if need be.

The guy immediately stopped his ogling. Kyle thought so, the sick bastard. Of course he wasn’t sure he was much better, as was confirmed by Emma.

“I don’t think you’re an a-hole. But I do think you’re the office flirt and quite the prankster,” Emma said, her voice dry. He couldn’t see her since he was behind her and facing away, but he could hear the plastic bag rattling as she stuffed her clothes into it.

Sometimes Emma sounded like she had fallen out of the forties. “Prankster?” Kyle snorted. “Flirt? Why, because I like to enjoy myself at work?”

“Oh, you definitely enjoy yourself when you’re sidling up to Gina in accounting and her cleavage. Usually when you’re an hour late on your deadline.”

Kyle was actually shocked. He now understood exactly why it seemed that Emma didn’t like him. It was because she didn’t like him.

Which was fine. Not great, but fine. She was entitled to not like him, even if he was harboring a serious case of lust for her. But she had no right to insult his professional integrity. “I’ve never been late on a deadline. And for your information, I have never noticed Gina’s cleavage. Her husband is a good friend of mine, so Gina and I are friends. That’s all there is to it.”

“Never late? Are you kidding me? And are you seriously trying to claim you don’t flirt with every woman in the office?”

“Never late. Not once,” he insisted. He and Claire had worked out a deal where he started at eight-thirty instead of eight Monday through Thursday and then on Fridays he came in an hour early and left an hour later. Maybe that had created a perception of tardiness, but he wasn’t sure why he had to explain that to her.

He added, “I’m friendly. I like people. Since when is that a crime?” It was actually the main reason he loved his job. He got to interact with both people in the office and out in the field. It was an industry of meetings, social gatherings, sporting events and fund-raisers. He covered them all, and enjoyed all of it. He may have lost his spot covering sports over a little press-pass snafu, but in the end he had given a longtime buddy who had cancer a once-in-a-lifetime shot at meeting the Cleveland Browns football players, and so he couldn’t regret his demotion.

If anything, writing his arts and entertainment column had opened up a whole new part of the city to him. And he was doing a damn good job, thank you very much. None of that seemed to matter to Emma, though.

It bugged the crap out of him that she made it sound like he was on the verge of violating sexual harassment laws. “And I don’t flirt with you,” he pointed out.

Her gasp of outrage indicated that wasn’t perhaps the best argument he could have used. The woman standing in front of him, who had originally been in line behind Emma, gave him a look confirming this. She shook her head slightly in what was clearly a friendly warning.

“Because I respect you,” he added. Usually that response could get a guy out of a veritable ton of trouble. It was akin to whitewashing graffiti in his experience.

“You’re a douche bag,” Emma said succinctly. “Respect that.”

So Emma definitely wasn’t like other women. While most ladies he knew thought he was charming, Emma read it as bullshit. That was something he wasn’t sure how to fix. Nor was he sure why he cared, but for some reason he did. For months it had been bothering him that Emma hadn’t warmed to him, and now it felt like a twofold mission—to force her to appreciate his good qualities and to determine why she thought work and fun had to be mutually exclusive.

“Maybe I don’t flirt with you because you’re mean to me,” he told her mildly, figuring arguing back was a tactic that wouldn’t work with Emma. It would just give her an excuse to stomp away from him indignantly. If he were calm, maybe it would calm her down.

She snorted. “I am not mean to you.” Weighted plastic hit him in the back. “Hold my bag,” she demanded.

Kyle figured that was an invitation to turn around.

So he did.

And was so glad he did.

Emma was fairly quivering with outrage from their conversation, goose bumps all over her skin, her eyes wide and snappish. The bag she was shoving at him no longer covered her breasts. They jiggled from her movements, free from their bra. Yes, he was looking. Yes, he felt zero guilt for looking. He just took the bag and waited with great interest as she stood, arms out, to receive her coating of green paint.

“You look ridiculous,” she told him, jumping with a shriek as the first spray of cool paint hit her.

“You don’t look so elegant yourself,” he told her. Only she didn’t look ridiculous. She looked delicious. Bouncy and juicy and flushed. Even her annoyance was hot. He liked to think that passion would translate to the bedroom, that when she let her cool mask of professionalism slip, she would tear a man up. She would be bossy and demanding, pushing him down while she drew his cock into her mouth...

“Why are you wearing your hat?” she asked him.

“Huh?” Kyle wished more than anything he could adjust his underwear. Things were really starting to become painful down there. All this up and down. It wasn’t good for a guy. “Because my keys are under it. I’m not sure I trust this whole numbering system.” He’d left his wallet and phone in the car, but he didn’t want his keys getting mixed up with someone else’s.

“You can’t wear that in the shoot.” The woman who was spraying Emma, a heavily tattooed girl in her twenties, gave him a look of disapproval. “Ian doesn’t allow any props.”

“I know. I’ll take it off before it’s time to shoot.”

“You’re wearing your keys on your head?” Emma asked him, stepping forward as the handler deemed her fully painted. “You look really silly.”

She was walking like Frankenstein, wet arms out in front of her, knees locked, her face shiny and very, very green. Some of the paint had strayed into her hair so that she looked like she’d been caught in an angry game of paintball and lost. Her nipples could have passed for a couple of undersize Brussels sprouts given their color, and she had scratched her nose, so the flesh peeked through the paint. Just for the record, he wasn’t the only one looking silly.

“If you call me a silly goose I’m going to make fun of you. Just a warning,” Kyle said.

She stuck her tongue out at him, a pink moist thrust through her green lips. It shouldn’t have been sexy, yet somehow it was. He couldn’t help but imagine that tongue on various parts of his body, sliding along, flickering over his flesh to torture him.

Kyle shifted uncomfortably. He needed to get away from her before the story here became him pushing her against the nearest wall and entwining his green body with hers in some sort of alien porno.

Fortunately, he was saved from potentially enormous embarrassment by a man speaking into a microphone. “All participants, you need to start moving into the warehouse where volunteers will show you to your spots.”

So they started shuffling forward, dozens of people in shades of green ranging from moss to emerald, and others in variations of brown. Emma hesitated. Kyle leaned forward and murmured to her, wanting to reassure and relax her. “Has anyone ever told you that you look good in green?”

Emma snorted. “No. It’s not on my color wheel.”

“Maybe they never saw you in head-to-toe green. Because it’s working on you right now.”

“Uh-huh.”

When she was directed to a spot against the wall of the warehouse with a cracked window above her head, Kyle said, “Work it, girl. Make love to the camera.”

Her lips twitched, like she was actually considering laughing. He took it as a good sign.

“Hat off!” A burly woman with a do-rag on her head and a clipboard in her hand snarled at him.

Kyle stripped off his hat, dumped his keys into it and thrust it behind his back as he moved into position beside Emma. He let the hat drop to the ground, his keys making a reassuring clinking sound. They had a way out of this place, that’s all he cared about. After the shoot he planned to interview some participants, but for the most part, he had all the necessary facts from the press release the artist’s team had released to the Journal. An opinion column was his favorite kind.

“How are you doing?” he asked Emma.

Her hip was bumping into his. “I don’t feel like art. I feel like a big naked emerald idiot. Do you even see the photographer?”

“No.” All he saw was a bunch of green butt cheeks as the people in front of them were instructed to lie on the floor on their stomachs. “I’m glad we get to stand. This building is probably radioactive. I don’t want my junk touching the ground even wearing briefs.” He shifted uncomfortably at the thought. “I would like kids one day.”

What had once been a thriving steel mill was now a crumbling warehouse with broken windows, the concrete beneath their feet reduced to a siltlike dust. Now that he thought about it, he wasn’t crazy about being barefoot. There was no way in hell he would lie down on the floor and breathe that rubble in.

“I thought they made steel here before it closed. How dangerous could that be?”

Kyle pointed to the sign hanging at an awkward angle. “That dangerous.”

It said Days Without An Accident: 3.

“Oh. Well, all the machinery is gone. And they said the shoot wouldn’t run that long.”

Great. Now she was reassuring him. He was supposed to be the man here, easing her nervousness about her nudity. Instead she was snaking her hand over and slipping it into his and squeezing. Wait. Nothing wrong with that.

Kyle squeezed back.

“I’m sure your virility is intact,” she told him.

There was no doubt about that. Kyle let his thigh brush hers, and their shoulders bumped. He glanced over at her. “Promise?”

She gave a short laugh before snapping her lips shut. “Yes.”

“You didn’t even look.” He was playing in dangerous territory here, but he was a gambling man. He would bet she wasn’t going to slap him in the middle of the photo shoot.

Emma turned to him, her tongue moistening her lips nervously. “Kyle...what are you doing?”

“Flirting with you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re attractive. Which I’ve always known, but today has given me a whole new appreciation for that fact.”

“You are not attracted to me.”

“Um, my Jolly Green Giant says otherwise.” He didn’t mean to brag, but anyone looking below his waist would see his erection. There was no disguising it, boxer briefs or not.

“Your...” Her eyes dropped. And widened. “Oh. Oh.”

He wasn’t sure he’d ever heard Emma speechless before. It was satisfying, to say the least.

She was still staring at his jock.

All the attention had it jumping a little. Which made her jerk away like she’d been stung by a bee.

Kyle smiled. He loved his job.