She was striving to sound coolly logical and matter-of-fact, but his mouth was busy nibbling and kissing and licking; it was too damned wonderful. Distracting! She meant distracting. She ought to kick him in the ’nads. Why wasn’t she kicking him in the ’nads? Or at least screaming for help?

Because he wouldn’t hurt her. Because he wanted her with a clear, hungry passion no man had ever shown her. Because she had a crush on him the size of Australia. Because if she screamed he might stop.

“Uh…help?” she said weakly, a moment before he rose up and his mouth was on hers. He smelled clean and masculine; his lips were warm and firm and insistent. His tongue traced her lower lip and then thrust into her mouth. Claimed it. His groin was pressing against hers, and she could feel his…er…pulse.

She tore her mouth from his, not without serious regret. If he kissed her like that again, it was all over. Good-bye, good-girl rep. Hello, new life as a slut puppy. “Condoms!” she shouted into his startled face. “I’ll bet you a hundred bucks you don’t have any.”

“Of course I don’t,” he said indignantly. He was—ack!—shrugging out of his shirt. His chest was tanned (in December!) and lightly furred with black hair. She actually moved to see if his chest hair was as crisp as it looked but then pulled her hands back and clenched them into fists. “I didna come here to mate. Have sex, I mean. I’m here on business. I never thought—”

“Yeah, well, that’s a problem, Buckaroo Banzai, because I didn’t exactly line my bra with prophylactics, either. Which means looky but no nooky. In fact,” she added on a mutter, “we shouldn’t even looky.”

“But you’re on the pill—ow, dammit!”

She’d formed a fist and smacked him between the eyes. The only way he would have known she was taking birth control pills is if he had gone through her purse while she was sick; she’d stopped at the pharmacy on the way to work and picked up her prescription.

“We had to,” he said, as if reading her mind. He rubbed the red spot on his forehead, which was rapidly fading. “Dr. Madison was concerned we’d have to take you to the hospital. She needed to know if you were taking any medication.”

“A likely story,” she grumbled, but it sounded plausible, so she didn’t follow up with a headbutt. Not that she’d ever done one in her life, but how hard could it be? “And it’s the minipill, Mr. Knows-So-Much. Besides, I’m not worried about getting pregnant—”

“You should be,” he teased. Except she doubted he was really teasing.