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  face.

  “Kate,” he managed. “What are you doing?”

  “The question is,” she said with mock seriousness, “what are you doing?”

  Had he really thought himself safe? Mistake number four, because he was about as safe as a guy who handled explosives for a living.

  Oh wait . . .

  He put his hands on her hips, hoping to hold her off, but his wires got crossed, and he pulled her in closer instead.

  “Mmm,” she said, and leaned on him, her cheek to his chest.

  He stared down at her dreamy expression and tried to harden his heart. He was good at that. But that wasn’t the part of him that hardened. “You’re drunk.”

  “Yes, but only a little.”

  He closed his eyes. “Look, there’s two people here tonight I won’t sleep with. My sister and—”

  “Don’t say me.”

  “You.”

  She stared at him then gave him a push. Since he was already up against the sink, he didn’t budge.

  “What’s wrong with me?” she asked. “I looked in the mirror, you know. I didn’t see a third eye or anything in my teeth.”

  “There is absolutely nothing wrong with you,” he said. “Not one fucking thing.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “But if I take you, it’s going to last all night.”

  Her eyes went a little glossy. “Still not seeing the problem.”

  “It’s going to be good,” he said. “It’s going to be so good that we’re going to wake up and start all over again. And then you’ll want to have breakfast. You’ll ask me when we’re going to see each other again.”

  Some of that glossiness vanished, and her eyes narrowed slightly.

  “I don’t want to hurt you, Kate,” he said, desperate for her to understand.

  “Uh-huh,” she said, not sounding impressed. “Let me see if I have this right. You don’t want to have sex with me because you think I might confuse said sex with love and, as a result, get hurt.”

  The reference to love threw him, and he hesitated a second too long because she went hands on hips. “You really think that,” she said. “Well, how insulting.”

  “Kate—”

  “I’m not stupid, Griffin. Maybe a little inexperienced compared to you, but I know enough to understand that love is earned.”

  There was that l-word again.

  She took in his expression and made a sound that managed to perfectly convey what she thought of him. Which was that he wasn’t exactly love material anyway.

  As he already knew.

  “I told you,” she said. “All I wanted was a damn adventure. A fun, naked one-night adventure. Why the hell can’t I have a damn fun, naked, one-night adventure like everyone else?”

  “Kate.”

  “Am I that undesirable?” she demanded to know. She tipped her head back and let out a big sigh. “Tommy’s wearing a cape, and Ashley’s going to go postal on her BFF and ex-BF, and my dad’s probably going to accidentally burn his house down, so I can’t leave them and go to San Diego to dissect a calf, but I really thought I could at least have this.”

  Was she speaking English?

  “I’m Holly’s something blue today,” she murmured, “and I bet she doesn’t even know it.” Another heaved sigh as she turned to the window, head tilted up to stare out at the night sky. It was lit by a moon half covered in clouds. “That cloud weighs about two hundred thousand pounds,” she said. “Crazy, right?”

  No. Crazy was standing in front of him in a bridesmaid dress with her hair now blowing around her face and her pretty eyes all glossy and troubled. Crazy was wanting to shove up her dress and then step between her spread legs and—

  “It just really chaps my ass,” she said.

  Yes, her ass. It was molded in that dress and perfect.

  “I wore some great lingerie tonight, too,” she went on. “And I mean really great.”

  This gave him pause.

  “Almost slutty even,” she said.

  Like a dog to a bone. He shifted closer, slid his hand up her back, and wrapped his fingers around the nape of her neck to turn her head to his. “How slutty?”

  She shoved past him and headed to the door. “Oh no. Forget it. You missed your opportunity. Again. And you know what? I’m starting to doubt your man-’ho reputation. Because I’m having no luck getting you naked.”

  He followed the hot, pissed-off, sexy ball of fluff down the hall, deciding not to touch that statement with a ten-foot pole. “I’m driving you home,” he said.

  “Not necessary.” She stepped outside and went still. “Dammit.”

  Her dad had her car.

  Grif came to a stop behind her. “I’ll drive you home,” he repeated. And he wouldn’t be getting out of the car to walk her in.

  No possible way.

  “This is really annoying,” she said. Her hair was a little out of control. Her dress was slipping off one shoulder, revealing a very narrow strap of something indeed pretty great and possibly slutty.

  “So screwed,” he muttered to himself.

  Kate crossed her arms over her chest and lifted her chin. “Nope. Screwing is completely off the table.”

  Twelve

  Fuming, Kate kept her face turned to Grif’s truck’s passenger-side window. The night was pitch-black as she gave the big, tall, far-too-sexy jerk in the driver’s seat her very best silent treatment.

  Not that he seemed to notice. Nope, he drove with a quiet, steady calm, deep in his zone, which only served to fuel her temper even more. How did he lock it all away? How did he reveal nothing?

  The answer to that slipped into her head, and she sighed. She knew how.

  The hard way.

  It had been drilled into him young and then further cemented by a life in the military, where feeling too much or allowing emotions to hit the surface could be deadly. It was dark in the interior of his truck, but she didn’t need a light to see the scar that ran along his temple and bisected his eyebrow.

  Okay. So yeah, he had very good reasons to be stoic and sure of his every move. But she wasn’t a war zone. And she wasn’t his grumpy father. And she sure as hell wasn’t just any silly drunken bridesmaid. She was . . . more.

  Or she’d wanted to be.

  Grif still hadn’t spoken as he drove with single-minded purpose, sitting there in that tux, exuding testosterone with every slow, even exhale. She wished she knew what he was thinking. Maybe she’d know if she could get him out of that tux, strip him down to six feet plus of warm, smooth skin wrapped around hard muscle and sinew and bone . . .

  But seriously. Who’d have thought he’d be so hard to get out of his clothes?

  “You never answered my question,” he said, startling her.

  “Which question?”

  “Who did you think you were groping in that dark corner on the dance floor?”

  Oh yeah. That question.

  He slid her a look.

  Dammit. He knew. “Ryan,” she said.

  “Ryan has blond hair.”

  “Like you said, it was dark.”

  “Not that dark,” he said.

  She shrugged.

  “You back with him, then?”

  “For someone who isn’t big on talking or communicating,” she said. “You’re sure doing a lot of it tonight.”

  “Yes or no, Kate.”

  She sighed. “No. I’m not back with Ryan.”

  “So who’d you think it was?”

  Her plan to ignore him was foiled when he slid her another look. It was all but impossible to ignore him when she was in the high beams of that steel gaze. “Fine!” she said. “I thought it was you, okay? But I don’t know why, since you’re a big, annoying, know-it-all, holier-than-thou alpha!”

  “You mistook me for Anders,” he said, sounding much more insulted at this than her actual insult. “He’s like a foot shorter than me.”

  “Not a foot. Maybe a few inches.”

  “And he needs t