Flat-Out Sexy Read Free Page A

worth the opportunity to meet you. It’s been a pleasure.”
    It was just good Southern manners. That’s all. He was trying to put her at ease, but Tamara felt warm in previously dormant places, and she was fairly certain it had nothing to do with the slightly excessive amounts of wine she’d tossed back. She wasn’t drunk and she wasn’t imagining the look he was giving her. Good manners didn’t dictate he stare at her like he was picturing her naked, and she was not imagining the way his eyes kept darting down to her mouth then back up again. Elec was as attracted to her as she was attracted to him, and it felt … bewildering. She had no clue how to deal with it, given that she’d married Pete at twenty-one after a two-year courtship and had only recently ventured back into dating, with the dubious choice of Geoffrey.
    This intrigue, this interest on both their parts, this sort of anticipation hanging in the air between them, was something she had zero experience with. So she stared at him, totally flustered, for a long, drawn-out second, then said, “Yeah. You, too.” Which made no sense at all, which embarrassed her and confused her even more. Feeling like she’d suddenly regressed to the shy sixteen-year-old she’d been, she gave him a quick smile, turned, and tried to walk, not run, away from him, with her heart pounding and her palms sweating.
    “What the hell was that?” she muttered to herself in complete disgust.
    That was her libido leaping back to life without warning for the first cute guy who looked her way.
    She suddenly knew that there was no putting off dealing with Geoffrey. Given that in two minutes standing next to Elec, a man she didn’t know from Adam, she’d had more sexual stirrings than she had in a solid month with Geoffrey, including the times he’d been pulling out all the stops à la oral sex, she couldn’t even wait until tomorrow to break up with him.
    Geoffrey had been a colossal mistake and she needed to rectify it, immediately. Then get her own hotel room so that she could stare at the ceiling and picture what it would be like to have Elec over her, naked, his dark eyes flickering over her body, his fingers trailing across her …
    Lord. Tamara fanned herself. What the hell had she been doing?
    Right. Finding Geoffrey.
     
     
    TAMARA waited for Geoffrey to say something to the careful words she’d just delivered to him, explaining how she wasn’t ready to date after all, that she respected him as a friend, and felt she’d made a mistake in rushing their relationship. It had sounded good to her. Believable. It was the truth, if not the whole truth.
    But Geoffrey was staring at her like she’d just said something in pig Latin, and she stared back, itching to take tweezers to those gray eyebrow hairs that poked out at random intervals from the rest of his brown brow. One, two, three, four … Tamara lost her place and started counting again. Dang, that was a lot of hairs that needed yanking.
    “It’s the money, isn’t it?” he asked. “I should have expected that, but I confess, I’m still disappointed.”
    “What?” She dragged her eyes from his runaway eyebrow hairs and met his disappointed gaze, wondering what he was talking about.
    “I know I can’t keep you in the lifestyle you’re accustomed to.”
    Was he joking? She could give a rat’s ass about his money. She had her own income, had Pete’s estate, and yet she still lived modestly, because labels and a fancy lifestyle weren’t important to her. Never had been. Her handbag cost fifteen bucks at Target. When had she ever given off a vibe that she was high maintenance?
    “It’s not about money, Geoffrey. I just don’t think we’re well suited to each other as more than friends. I like you as a person, but I just don’t think we’re more than that.”
    “You came here tonight, didn’t you, and it reminded you of how you miss all of this—the champagne, the parties, the track, the money.”
    Um