High-Stakes Playboy by Cindy Dees

and whistles. “I was just thinking.”
    “About what?”
    “Making out and steaming up the windows.”
    He glanced over at her, looking distinctly startled. And disappointed, if she was reading him correctly. “Direct, much?” he murmured. “I pegged you for the type who would let the guy make the first move. Silly me.”
    Her cheeks heated up. Good thing the dashboard was already casting hellish red light up at her face. “Sorry. That came out wrong.”
    “I thought it came out just fine.”
    She gulped. Yeah, but she wasn’t necessarily prepared to follow up on her inadvertent proposition. It was one thing to wish to get rid of her incredibly inconvenient virginity. It was another thing altogether to do the deed.
    “I probably ought to warn you that I don’t have very good luck with guys.”
    He glanced over at her sharply. “Why not?”
    “They tend to, um, have accidents.” She added in an embarrassed rush, “I think I may be jinxed.”
    “Good thing for you I don’t believe in magic, then.”
    “I’m serious, Archer.”
    “So am I.” He turned the truck off at a scenic overlook, and she was surprised to see the film set sprawling under huge banks of work lights in the valley below. “What are they building?” she asked curiously.
    “Fake city. Adrian’s going to blow it up day after tomorrow.”
    She looked over at him sharply. “Are we going to have to fly over it and film the explosion?”
    “That’s the plan.” His voice was clipped, but otherwise emotionless. Still, she thought she felt tension emanating from him.
    “Tell me about your job.”
    “You’ve seen my job. I fly camerawomen over movie sets.”
    “The way I hear it, you were a military pilot in a former life.”
    “Where did you hear that?”
    She’d heard it from Tyrone, who’d been a veritable fountain of information and gossip earlier while he’d been doing her makeup. She shrugged at Archer. “You know how movie sets are. Everybody knows everything about everyone.”
    “Lord, I hope not,” he muttered fervently.
    She chuckled in commiseration.
    He reached behind the seat and emerged with a six-pack of brown longnecks in a cardboard carrier. He opened one and held it out to her. “I did promise you a beer.”
    She reached out to take it and her fingers wrapped over his.
Strength. Heat. All man.
An image of her body entwined with his the way their fingers were right now blazed across her brain. Skin on skin. Naked bodies tightly pressed together. Lust and sweat and—
holy cow.
She let go abruptly. He lifted the beer higher and she grasped the bottle below his hand. God, she was such a klutz. A freaking horny one.
    “I’m a search-and-rescue guy.”
    “Which means what?” She was a total civilian. She knew zilch about the military. Sure, she got that he searched for people and rescued them, but she had no idea what that entailed.
    “SR pilots insert troops into hot zones and extract them when they’re done. Sometimes they deliver urgent supplies, or fly generals to their golf games. It’s a little of this and that.”
    “Do people usually let you get away with baloney answers like that?”
    He grinned around the mouth of his bottle and finished taking a pull on his beer. “Yeah, actually. They do.”
    “Maybe they haven’t flown with you recently. I’ve never seen anyone come that close to dying and be so completely unaffected by it afterward. Did you come that close to dying all the time in your military work?”
    His face went tight. Closed. Even so, he was beautiful to look at, but the stress around his eyes was palpable.
    He spoke tightly. “I wasn’t unaffected by today. That was a hell of a serious mechanical malfunction we had. You and I both came damned close to dying. And no, I don’t usually flirt with death quite that intimately. Sure, missions go bad from time to time. It’s the nature of flying in war zones. But I’ve always done my damnedest not to endanger myself, my crew, my