Intimate Knowledge. Julie Miller
“Hey!” She heard it land on something soft as he tossed it aside. The bombardment of man and lingering sex and unexpected actions made her jump when she felt his hands at her nape. “What are you doing now?”
“Seeing if I can help you.”
Logan’s deft fingers seemed to have had plenty of practice unfastening pins and rubber bands. He loosened her hair from its constrictive wrap and it fell around her shoulders down to the middle of her back. It had grown long and untamable, so she never wore it free. Even at night, she wove it into a braid to sleep.
But there was something…distracting…in the way he sifted the long strands through his fingers. Lifting it to test its weight, easing the pressure on her scalp. Something…soothing…in the way he draped it along her shoulder blades.
She should write this down. This feeling of being tended. This…
“It has a natural wave in it. Lots of potential—if you do something with it. We’ll cut it so the weight doesn’t pull it straight.”
His impersonal tone snapped her out of her foolish observations. It seemed he was doing his job. At last. She should remember her job, as well. “I’m prepared to alter my appearance.”
“I hope so.” He released her hair and stepped away. “The only way you’ll turn any man’s eye with that outfit is if you take it off. Let me have the jacket.”
“Agent Pierce, I hardly think—”
He was already tugging at the shoulders. Grace quickly unhooked the buttons before it ripped and he pulled it off.
“You want me for my expertise. I need to see what I have to work with.”
A whisper of wool gabardine landed in the corner somewhere. “This is a two-hundred-dollar suit, Agent Pierce.”
“You’ll have to cut the ‘agent’ crap. Call a man by his name.”
She felt the tug on the top button of her blouse before she saw his hand there. Grace swatted it away. “What do you think you’re doing—” she swallowed hard and forced herself to say his name “—Logan?”
“That’s better.” His hands returned, resuming their path down to her waist. “All of this has to go so I can assess what you’re asking of me. I’m all for getting Mitchell, but I don’t like impossible missions.”
“Impossible?”
Plain white cotton seemed no barrier for the man, either. He pushed the blouse down her arms and pulled it free of her waistband. It joined the jacket. In a self-conscious habit learned by the age of fourteen, she crossed her arms in front of her, laying her left hand on her right shoulder, her right hand at her waist, forming a shield of armor to mask every plump inch from an unkind word or critical eye.
His fingers moved to the zipper on her skirt.
Impossible, he’d said. That hurt. She had never flaunted her body. Not intentionally at any rate. Not once. She forced her mind away from the taunts and teasing of her adolescent peers. She shut down the memory of grown men leering at her, speaking to other parts of her anatomy instead of making eye contact.
At least Logan was denigrating her for the right reasons, not casting her aside as inconsequential because she’d managed to inherit one inescapable thing from her mother.
Make that two.
She was down to bra, half-slip, panties and hose before he pried her hands from their protective positions and spread her arms wide to either side of her.
Grace knew the exact moment when his gaze lit on her breasts. Though she couldn’t see his expression, she could imagine the surprise, maybe even admiration, and certainly interest that would cross his face.
Attached to a five-foot, five-inch body, a 40DD seemed to have that dumbing-down effect on a man.
Maybe he even noticed the ample hips, rounded to match, giving her body that out-of-date, out-of-place hourglass shape that had served her mother so well in the string of B-movies she’d starred in back in the 1970s.
That same shape that Grace had fought for years.
“I know I’m fat—”
“Fat?”
“—but there’s no way I can lose ten or twenty pounds in a week’s time. You’ll have to work with what’s here. If you’re willing to take the job, that is.”
Logan released her arms and she hugged herself again, praying the room’s rise in temperature was due to a faulty thermostat and not her own blushing skin.
“You’re worried about seducing a man with a body like that?”
“Yes! Why the hell else would I…”
The husky timbre of his voice registered. The low-pitched rumble skittered along her skin, raising goose bumps. His voice alone triggered the same electric switch that had left her body humming from his touch just moments earlier. Damn, she wished she could see his face. Was he calling her an idiot for not knowing how to use her mother’s gifts to full advantage? Or was there a note of promise in his tone that meant he was considering working with her?
“Does this mean you’ll be my partner?”
Above her own pounding heartbeat, his long-winded sigh was the only sound in the room. Grace squinted, trying to read his expression, trying to find out if that was a yes or a no. Though she could see his silhouette, he was just a big, broad blur to her eyesight.
“There are ten things I find sexy in a woman, Miss Lockhart—Grace. The first is when she looks me straight in the eye. You should write that down as rule number one in your little notebook.”
Grace began to hope. “Well, since you’ve conveniently taken my glasses and my notebook from me, there’s no way I can. And I asked you to call me Agent—”
Her words caught in a strangled gulp in her throat as Logan suddenly stepped into focus. That meant he was close enough to… The temperature went up another ten degrees. He was close enough…she could feel his measured breath stirring the tendrils of hair along her forehead. He was close… She was standing in her underwear and he was fully dressed. For decorum’s sake, she should move away.
And yet those steel-gray eyes ensnared her as if she was a helpless bird caught in his trap.
“Eye contact?” Oh, God, that quavering, wispy voice sounded so like her mother’s. “What are the other nine rules?”
He didn’t touch her, yet she could feel him. Their breaths mingled in a strangled heat. And she did her research. Up close like this, she could see the individual whiskers on his cheeks and jaw, dark little pinpricks that made her palms itch with curiosity to touch them.
Rule number one. Look a man in the eye.
She ran her gaze past the flat, flexing plateau of his lips and up beyond the slightly bent angle of his nose to those eyes. This close, she could see the silvery sunburst of color around his pupils, bewitching irises of dove-gray and steel and flint, rimmed by a darker shade of charcoal.
She’d never seen such beautiful eyes.
“Just like that,” he whispered, his words stirring a caress of air against her cheek.
Grace’s lungs expanded, as if just now remembering to breathe. The sudden intake of oxygen seemed to stir some coherent thought inside her brain.
“Does that mean you’re taking the assignment?”
“You’re going after Mitchell no matter what I say, aren’t you?”
Trapped by the unexpected warmth in those beautiful gray eyes, she could only nod.
“You’re clueless enough that somebody needs to watch your back.”
His shoulders shifted in her peripheral vision, and a moment later