Her Enemy Protector by Cindy Dees Page A

are both street fighters.”
    He laid a finger on her lips, stopping any further protests from her. “Trust me. They don’t pose a threat.”
    She frowned.
    His grin widened. “Wanna really give them something to stew over?”
    Her eyebrows raised in question, but that was all the response she had time for before he leaned down swiftly and captured her mouth with his.
    Wow. Heat and man surrounded her completely, invading the darkest corners of her mouth and her mind. His lips and tongue were warm and wet, biting and licking and sucking like she was the best ice-cream cone he’d ever tasted, all sweet and drippy and melting, and he was determined to capture every last drop of her.
    Her knees went wobbly without warning and she leaned into him, suddenly hot all over. She devoured him right back, and Lord, if her insides didn’t actually start to quiver with desire. She needed him like water in the desert. She hadn’t even known it, but her soul had been dried up, shriveled and parched until he breathed life back into her. She all but inhaled him, right there on the spot. Her leg started to creep up, to wrap around him, to press her core against the hard bulge at her belly. But then a sound that was more a groan than a chuckle came from his throat. No. No, no, no! She had to have more of him right now! All of him!
    Gently, his fingers wrapped around the back of her knee, disentangling it from around his thigh. His thumb gave a single caress to the sensitive skin behind the joint, sending white heat shooting up her thigh and straight to her core. Her breath hitched and his gaze snapped to hers, his black eyes blazing.
    Oh, yes. They definitely had a spark between them. More like chain lightning.
    He lifted his mouth away from hers. Cleared his throat.
    She clung to his shoulders, not because she was needy and trying to seduce him but because her legs were so weak she wasn’t sure they’d bear her weight.
    “Uh, well then,” he mumbled, “I think that pretty much seals the deal.”
    “How’s that?” she managed to mumble back through the buzz of lust filling her ears.
    “When Frick and Frack report to your old man that I just examined your tonsils with my tongue, and in public, I’m betting daddy dearest will stick a shotgun in my face and make me marry you if I don’t beat him to the punch.”
    And abruptly, she became aware of several hundred people staring at her as avidly as if she’d just grown horns and a third eye. Why was her skin crawling all of a sudden at the idea of all those gazes locked on her and Joe? She’d made a spectacle of herself plenty of times. She’d even laid hot kisses on guys in public before, back when Eduardo didn’t watch her every move, back before Julia disappeared. But tonight, the party-girl mask just wouldn’t stay on. It kept slipping away, leaving her raw emotions unprotected, her heart on display. Her heart. Not an act. Not the public image that everyone always saw. But her. Carina. For real.
    She never, ever, showed her true self to anyone. Not to her father. Not to rooms full of cynical, voyeuristic jet-setters, and certainly not to Joe. He was practically a stranger, for God’s sake! She barely knew him at all. And what she did know of him didn’t inspire a girl to think of happily ever after, kids and rocking chairs.
    She vaguely realized that she was still bent half-backward over his arm, his strength supporting most of her weight. His body, hard and hot, pressed into her, branding itself on her memory, marking her as his.
    And then with a quick bunching of his muscles, she was upright once more, whirling off into a kaleidoscope of light and color. Music throbbed in time with the pulsing desire between her thighs. Her breasts ached for his hard chest against hers once more.
    With a snap of his strong wrist, he spun her away from him and pulled her back again. And then his other hand landed in the middle of her back, anchoring her sinfully against him.
    She sighed