Private Dancer by Suzanne Forster

glass in both hands and told herself to put it down. Instead, she watched him push away from the door and stand tall. His head wasn’t half a foot from the top of the doorway, she realized. He was that big a man.
    “Have you been thinking about it too, B.J.?” A faint huskiness snuck into his voice. “Thinking about it the way I have?”
    “Thinking? About what?”
    “The way I touched you yesterday. The way you touched me.”
    She shook her head and turned away from him, setting the glass down on the counter too quickly. Iced tea sloshed over and the lemon wedge tumbled off the rim. Bev breathed in so deeply, the sharp tang of citrus burned her nostrils.
    “Why would I be thinking about that?” she said, grabbing a cloth to mop up the spill. She sounded out of breath and hopelessly insincere.
    “Maybe because it was exciting.”
    She heard him come up behind her and sent up a quick prayer for self-control. The other times they’d been together, he’d been shockingly aggressive, and she’d reacted more out of self-defense than arousal.
    This was different. He was different. Quiet, smoky-voiced, alive with sexual danger.
    “Was it exciting?”
    She tossed off an answer that was meant to be noncommittal. “What if it was? Buying a new dress is exciting.”
    “I don’t know what you were shopping for, lady, but it wasn’t dresses.” He drew closer, his voice a rough caress. “You gave me one hell of a jolt. And don’t tell me you didn’t know it.”
    Bev felt the heat coming off his body. It ran the length of her back, accumulating in all those nerve-rich places where she was anticipating contact. Her calves were tingling, her shoulder blades, even her buttocks. He hadn’t touched her, but he was driving her crazy wondering when he would.
    “Stop it,” she said.
    “What? I haven’t done anything. Except try to answer your question.”
    “What question?”
    “You asked me why you should be thinking about yesterday. Why you should remember what we did and the way it made you feel.” He became silent for a moment. “You still haven’t answered my question. Did you find it exciting when I touched you?”
    She felt something brush against the back of her thigh, and her imagination went off like a rocket. Was it his knee? His hand? She pressed against the countertop, her hipbones coming into contact with the cold ceramic tile. There wasn’t going to be a repeat of yesterday’s “excitement.” She had no intention of letting him fondle her again.
    He let out a low, sexy gust of laughter that lifted the damp hairs on her neck. “I don’t think that counter’s going anywhere. You can relax your grip on it.”
    “Stop it,” she ordered, whirling around to face him. “I want you to stop it! Now.”
    “Stop what?”
    The question threw her into a quandary. “I don’t know. Whatever it is you’re doing.” The problem was he wasn’t doing anything, at least not anything physical. “You’re intimidating me with words,” she said, “baiting and teasing, playing with me. I’m not a child, for heaven’s sake. I can’t be turned on and off like some battery-operated toy.”
    “Interesting concept.” He studied her through lowered lashes, his expression flickering with curiosity and a blue-eyed arrogance that was distinctly male, distinctly him. “As for the child business,” he said, “that was the furthest thing from my mind. You don’t look like a child. You don’t feel like a child. If I’m playing with you, it’s an adult game and you qualify.”
    He raised his hand, a lazy arc of motion. Bev flinched back, certain that he was going to touch her in some way, perhaps even intimately.
    “Don’t try to kid yourself, Lace, or me,” he said, rolling the toothpick between his fingers before he took it from his mouth and flicked it into her kitchen sink. “I’m not calling the shots here. You’re woman enough to have a man if you want one, and simply because you want one.”
    “Stop