All or Nothing (11 page)

Except…the bastard was
laughing
.

“What’s so damned funny all of a sudden?” she demanded.

“You are,” he replied, turning to her, but there was no trace of humor on the hard planes of his face. “I have never met anyone as full of complete bullshit as you, Belle. And that’s saying a lot, considering I split an egg with
Kyle
.”

“What are you—”

“
You don’t have a heart.
Do you hear yourself when you say these things? Do you even comprehend how many lies you tell yourself each day? I lose count and I’m a goddamned accountant!”

“You’re rambling.”
And I’m not listening to it.
If she did, she might have to admit he was right and she would never do that.

“No, I’m frustrated!”

“I could take care of that, but you turned me down,” she tossed over her shoulder, reaching down for Sparky’s leash. Damn dog was going to kill her if he kept hiding behind her feet.

“This is not about sex,” Lucas growled.

She laughed, the acidic sound burning her throat. “Like hell it’s not.”

He reached for her, taking hold of her arm and spinning her around. “I love you, Belle. If you think I just want some random fuck in the sand, you’re out of your damned mind.”

Belinda stared down at his hand, holding her tighter than he ever had before. She could handle his roughness during sex. She wasn’t the lightest hand in those moments either, but everything in her began to burn at the sight of his hand on her this way. “Let go, Lucas.”

“Not until you start being honest with me.”

She pulled at her arm, willing her anger to stay inside. But the terror inching inside grew teeth when he took hold of her other arm.

“Belle—”

“No!” She shoved at his chest, her scream startling him into letting go. He tumbled down to the sand while she stood over him, shaking.

“Hey, everything okay over there?” someone called from the beach fire not too far away.

Belinda brought her hands to her face, willing the trembling to stop. She wanted to run, wanted to throw up, wanted to fall to her knees and beg him to stop looking at her as if he’d done something to hate himself for.

“Miss?” The voice was closer now, coming up behind her. Her trembling increased. She forced her mind to remember there were no bruises on her face this time. No bloody noses. Not even tears.

“She’s fine.” Lucas rose from the sand, picking up her hat and her shoes with one hand. How many times had he done that for her while they were growing up? He hadn’t been able to protect her from Adam, but he’d known she hated the pity on other kids’ faces, hated the shame, and he’d shielded her time and time again.

“Not asking
you
, buddy,” the kid had the temerity to say to a glowering Lucas. It’d be funny if it weren’t her life. When she was a kid, what she wouldn’t have given for someone to be so concerned when her father tried to rattle her teeth loose. Now, when she needed a hero the least, a perfect stranger swept in. Irony sucked.

“I’m fine.” She turned to look at the guy. God, he couldn’t be more than twenty, a little soft in the middle from too much drinking over the summer. Lucas could have flattened him. She forced a smile past the bile and added, “Just a little misunderstanding.”

Dear God…

“You’re sure?” The kid swept another gaze over Lucas.

She nodded. “Completely.”

I’ve become my mother.

The kid left, shaking his head because he didn’t believe her. How could he? She couldn’t believe what she’d just done, herself. If ever there were a reason to hate Lucas, she’d just found it.

But she couldn’t hate him.

So she hated herself a little bit more.

“I never meant to scare you,” Lucas said quietly.

She could just imagine the guilt coursing through him right now. He knew he hadn’t hurt her. But he’d triggered hurt she worked hard to bury. To overcome. “It’s just as well,” she said, suddenly tired. “We should turn back.”

“Belinda.”

“No, Lucas. I think we just proved why this would never work. You’re better off losing this bet. The last thing you need is to go around defending your honor because I can’t handle myself.”

“The only one who thinks I’m honorable is you.” He fell in step beside her. It must have been a half mile before he spoke again, hands in his pocket, dog at his side. “I’m not giving up on us.”

Somehow, she knew he’d say that. “You’re looking for a love affair. I can’t give you one. So if you stick around, it’s your funeral.”

“You planning to do me in?”

She rolled her eyes. “Sexually, maybe.” She might want to get rid of him, but if he got off his high horse,
she
wasn’t going to miss out.

“I doubt it.” He sounded so speculative she turned to stare at him.

“Why? Mr. Raging Hard-On get damaged back there?”

“No, Mr. Raging Hard-On is keeping it zipped.”

She laughed. “Sure you are. If I wanted to, I could get you in my bed at the drop of a hat. Faster if I wanted you on the floor.”

His self-deprecating smile wasn’t aimed at her. “If I don’t get all of you, Belle, I don’t want you at all.”

Her feet stopped moving on their own. He took a few steps past her, then stopped. Sparky drooped between them, probably wishing they’d pick him up.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

Lucas nodded. “I’ll admit to being desperate. But I’m not cheap.”

Given how much they broke in her apartment the last time, she would never have called him that. “My body is the most I’m willing to offer. Even if I lose this bet, you’ll never have more of me than that.”

“But you don’t think you’re losing,” he said, turning to walk again.

Sparky looked at her, little ears low as he whined before following his master.

“I’m
not
losing,” she called out to Lucas’s back. He didn’t seem to hear.

Or maybe he just didn’t want to.

How did he do it? Take her emotions on a trip that made the roller coaster over there look like a kiddie ride and come out on the other side as the man she couldn’t stay angry at? Why did he make her feel vulnerable and safe, miserable and happy, all at the same time? Was it on purpose? Or was it as close to charm as Lucas Lonnigan could get?

Shaking her head, strangely smiling while she did, she plopped her hat back on her head and ran to catch up.

She’d like to say the Devil made her do it. But really, who would believe her? Everyone knew she didn’t need help from amateurs when it came to being evil. Lucas’s remark about not sleeping with her the night before had left Belinda with an urge to set him straight. The decision to have sex was never—and would never be—in his hands.

“Get naked,” she said as soon as Lucas and Sparky entered the back gate to her metal yard just before noon.

He blinked at her twice. Slowly. “Excuse me?”

“Oh, sorry, I have to be formal?” She could blink innocently, too, and showed him, smiling as sweetly as she possibly could without falling over from insulin failure. “I dare you to pose for me.” She pointed at a borrowed pool chair with a sheet draped over it in the middle of her metal yard. “Nude.”

He stared at the chair with a frown the likes of which she hadn’t seen since high school.

“You’re a
metal
artist.”

She grinned. “Are you saying you never get hard?”

His deep blue eyes gleamed and he shook his head at her, obviously trying to decide whether he should run and hide or stay and bare.

“You could always cry uncle.” She knotted her hands behind her back. Her stomach rippled. Which didn’t make a lot of sense. She wanted him to give up. Maybe not as much as she wanted him naked, though. Particularly naked and understanding exactly who was in control.

“Even if I wanted to,
you
don’t want me to,” Lucas eventually said, sounding long-suffering and making her frown while he pulled his T-shirt from his jeans. He headed to the lounge in the middle of her sorted junk piles, lifting the fabric over his head. Why did he have to turn everything into an examination? Couldn’t she simply get a kick out of forcing him to undress?

She hadn’t done any life drawing in years, but Lucas naked could inspire the arthritic into picking up art tools. She grabbed a sketch pad and her charcoal tin, then set herself up cross-legged on an overstuffed wicker chair she used for idea hunting. By the time she was ready, he was undressed.

Suddenly wasting him on a drawing seemed like a damn shame.

He stood there, hands on his lean hips in utter defiance, peering down at the lounge without trust while she stared at his tight ass without a thought in her head. “How do you want me?”

All kinds of suggestions surged to her empty mind.
Beneath me, over me, behind me…any way you can get inside me.

She cleared her throat.
The idea is to torment
him
, dumbass.
“Sit, with your knees sort of…drawn up?”

She tried not to laugh as he tested the chaise by sitting gingerly. He wasn’t a man who often had to move gingerly and aside from showers and sex, he probably didn’t move naked too often, either. Shoving him outdoors that way was probably the cruelest thing she could do.

Too bad he didn’t seem victimized in the slightest. Meanwhile, her face was threatening to need a team of firefighters to put it out. And the bugger knew it, thanks to the fact that hair dye did absolutely nothing to change a platinum blonde’s complexion.

But she couldn’t give in. However dumb these dares became, embarrassing or difficult, she had to remember what the goal was: keeping Lucas from the biggest mistake of his life. If that meant embarrassing the crap out of him and taking whatever cruel kindnesses he doled out, she could do it. Whether or not she could remember her own name while he strolled around nude, however, was up for debate.

“I don’t think this is what you want,” he mumbled, looking at himself, clearly unable to decide what to do with his limbs. “Why don’t you come over here and set me up?”

It was a trap. A deliberately lame excuse to seduce her while he was nude. First, she’d go over there and he’d smile at her in his way. Or he’d touch her in some way. He’d search out the chink in her armor and once he had her going, who knew what she’d say to get him inside her? Not a good plan.

She’d never have gone anywhere near him if getting him naked hadn’t been her own idea. The best defense was a good offense, wasn’t it? Wasn’t that how she lived her life? Yes, and Lucas Lonnigan was not about to change that while playing on her home field. Carefully she set down her implements, then crossed the dirt path to his towel-draped throne.

“You want me to
touch
you?” she asked, setting her hands on her own hips; the better to keep from grabbing him.

Lucas raised a brow. “Do you know another way to move me around?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “You promise to keep your hands to yourself, because I don’t believe for a second that you’re noble enough not to take advantage.”

He looked her over, almost pointedly taking in her overall cut-offs with the bib falling down on one side and the white shirt with pink and blue skulls on it arranged like flowers over her small breasts. “I think you’re safe. You’d have plenty of time to knock my balls in before I so much as got your button undone.”

The reference to his privates, of course, made her glance right at them before looking immediately back to his face with her mouth skewed. “What am I supposed to do with that?”

He didn’t look repentant about his arousal. It jutted up next to his raised thigh, grazing the folds of his belly as his torso curved so he could settle his forearm on his bent knee. The other leg lay, bent as well, his left foot on its side in the space between his thigh and right foot “You had plenty of ideas last time.”

She should have brought the charcoal tin, just to toss it at his head. “You have no shame, Lonnigan.”

“I don’t need any with the way you’ve been looking at me.” He tilted his head back to squint at her in the sunlight, grinning like a loon. A proud, well-endowed loon. She refused to inspect him further until she was safe in her chair several feet away.

How on earth had she ever thought stripping him would give her any kind of an edge? He obviously had no qualms about his body or its effect on her. This wasn’t control. It wasn’t even a power play. The man had her frazzled in ten seconds flat.

Well, maybe not
flat
…

“Can’t you do something about it? It’s casting shadows.”

“It likes you. If you want it to go down, you know how to get it that way.”

Her hands itched to take hold of him and do exactly that. To ease him into the palm of her hand, circle him with her fingers, take him deep into her mouth and stroke until he lost all control. He tempted her further, closing his eyes, leaving himself utterly open for attack. For just a second, she reached out, but this was a trap and she knew it. If she wanted him, she was going to have to admit to caring about him. Admit him in more ways than she cared to count.

She pulled her hands back to her overalls, shoving them in her pockets. “Did you just make your next dare?”