ROMeANTICALLY CHALLENGED. Marina Adair
wasn’t it? All self-righteous about dating, telling me my luck was bound to run out and I’d end up attracting one of those Crazy Cuties.” He took his time giving her another once-over, paying extra-special attention to her panties—cheeky cut, if he were a betting man. “You don’t look like one of those. But I’ve been wrong before.”
“Crazy?” She snatched the remote control off the coffee table.
“See now, Goldilocks, you’re missing the whole cutie part.”
She stood there, straddling that threshold between retreat and retaliation, remote poised and aimed for complete castration, and contemplating her next move.
Emmitt stepped closer, dwarfing her with his size, then leveled her with a Come at me, I dare you look that would scare most grown men shitless.
This woman was neither scared nor intimidated. Stubborn, narrowed eyes met his and made him wonder where the meek people-pleaser he’d heard on the phone had disappeared to. There was nothing meek about the woman standing in front of him. She looked like a genie who’d broken free from her lamp. Not that blond babe who granted wishes either. No, this genie looked as if she had a thousand years of anger stored up and ready to unleash on some poor SOB.
“My name is Anh Nhi Walsh. Or Annie if that’s too cosmopolitan for you to manage.”
He was about to inform her that his passport had more stamps than a philatelist when she decided he was the poor SOB.
Clutching the remote for all she was worth, she pulled back and smiled. Emmitt knew that smile well. He’d invented that smile.
In fact, he was the grand fucking master of smiles, with double-barreled dimples that he’d hated as a boy and exploited as a man.
Emmitt Bradley was a certified chameleon who could comfort, intimidate, or seduce with a simple twitch of the lip. But her particular smile promised war—painful and bloody.
So he took that smile and raised her a grin—Cheshire with a just enough How you doing to make her pause—and that was his window. Without giving her time to react, he did some quick maneuvering, pressing her against the adjacent wall, her hands pinned above her head.
With a startled gasp, she looked up at him with eyes that had to be the darkest shade of brown he’d ever seen.
“Let go,” she shouted, her breath coming in erratic bursts. With every breath she took, the lace of her corset brushed his chest, reminding him that, between the two of them, they were barely wearing enough fabric to floss their teeth.
“You done?” he countered. When she narrowed her gaze, he took the remote from her hand, then tossed it on the chair. He gave her wrist one last warning squeeze. “We good?”
She nodded.
“I’m going to take your word for it.” He studied the stubborn set of her chin, her full pouty lips, and those dangerously dark and tempting bedroom eyes that could make a man forget his good sense. She was trouble. And, damn, he loved trouble—almost as much as he loved women. “You break that trust and try to throw anything other than panties my way and I’ll pin you to the floor. Got it, Anh Nhi Walsh?”
She froze the moment he spoke her name. And yeah, it had been good for him too. Kind of slid right off his tongue, coming out more a promise than the threat he’d intended. But hey, he’d go with it. Everything behind his boxers was demanding he rethink that no-women rule.
“Annie’s fine. And my panties aren’t going anywhere.”
He stared her down for a long minute, then let her wrists go. He didn’t back up though. He could pin her to the floor, but he was pretty sure he was sporting a woody and didn’t want to bring any more attention to it.
She must have noticed, because her cheeks turned the sexiest tint of pink.
“Annie it is.” He glanced at his home security panel. The light was blinking a steady red. It was armed. “Now, you want to tell me how you got past the security system?”
She opened her mouth to shout again—he could tell—so he put his fingers over her lips. His head was one word from the jackhammers breaking the rest of the way through his skull. “Quietly. Tell me quietly.”
“I punched in the pass code,” she said through her teeth. “Now you. How did you get in?”
“By unlocking the door I installed when I bought this house.” He jerked his chin to the key ring hanging by the door, only then noticing the starlit sky beyond the windows. It was just as dark as when he’d closed his eyes earlier. “What time is it?”
“Eight-thirty.”
He’d barely slept a few hours. No wonder he felt like crap. He was thirsty, tired, and needed to pee. Time to tell Goldilocks to start looking for a new bed, because even if his was just right, it was closed for the summer.
“Look, it’s been fun,” he said, running a hand down his face and coming to a hard stop when he reached his jaw. He touched it again and felt the days-old scruff against his palm. “What day is it?”
“Wednesday.”
“Jesus.” He’d slept twenty hours—not two—losing an entire day.
Slowly, he made his way to the kitchen, where he opened the fridge and grabbed a beer.
“You’re Emmitt Bradley?”
“Never heard my name sound like an accusation before, but yeah.” He popped the cap, took a long swallow, then contemplated spitting the liquid back in the bottle.
Whoever thought—he read the label—kiwi paired with hops should be fired. With a grimace, he lowered the bottle and found her standing in front of him, her earlier outfit covered by a blue scrub top.
“Emmitt of the ‘Hey Emmitt, this is Tiffany,’” she said in a perfect barfly voice that was three parts helium, one part phone sex operator. “‘You’d better call me when you get back in town. I had to hear it from Levi that you’d come and gone without so much as a kiss hello.’” She rolled her eyes and her voice went back to the deep, throaty one he preferred. “That’s Tiffany with a Y. Not to be confused with Tiffani with an I, who won’t be back until the leaves start to fall but wanted you to know she was thinking of you.”
Fighting back a smile, he wiped the back of his mouth and set the bottle on the island. “And you know this how?”
Her bare feet shuffled over to the telephone. There was a stack of sticky notes posted next to it. She flipped through them, then held up exhibit one. “This is Tiffany with a Y.” She walked over and smacked it on his bare chest. “This is Tiffani with an I.” Another smack. “Then there’s Shea, Lauren, and Jasmine.”
Slap slap slap.
“Rachelle and Rochelle.”
He grinned down at her. “That was only one slap. Which was it, Rachelle or Rochelle?”
“Both,” she said dryly. “When your mailbox here filled up, they stopped by. Together.” As his grin grew, her lips pressed together until they resembled a single line. “Then there’s Chanelle, Amber, Ashley, Nicole, Sweet P, Diana”—she looked up—“who made me promise I’d write down ‘Dirty Diana.’ Said you’d know what that meant.” That one got a big smack.
“Ow,” he said, but she didn’t look concerned.
“Here.” She handed him what was left of the stack.
He pulled them off one by one, looking for the only message he cared about. He dropped them to the floor as quickly as he disqualified their importance. The further he went, the worse his head ached, until squinting only made things unbearable.
He held the notes back out to her. “Can you find the one from Sweet P?”
“I’m not your secretary.”
“Now, there’s another side