Rogue Stallion Read Online Free PDF Page A

sensitive as a woman’s,” heexplained quietly. “It excites me when you trace it like that.”
    The soft words brought her abruptly to her senses. She was making love to a man on a public street in front of the bus depot. With a soft groan, she dragged her hand away from him and bit her lower lip until she tasted blood.
    “What a horrified expression,” he murmured as he refastened his shirt. “Does it shock you that you can feel like a woman? Or don’t you think I know that you hide your own emotions in the job? All this empathy you pour out on your clients is no more than a shield behind which you hide your own needs, your own desires.”
    Her face tightened. “Don’t you psychoanalyze me! ” she gasped, throwing his earlier words right back at him.
    “If I’m locked up inside, so are you, honey,” he drawled, watching her react to the blunt remark.
    “My personal life is my own business, and don’t you call me honey!”
    She started to turn, but he caught her by the upper arms and turned her back around. His eyes were merciless, predatory.
    “Were you raped?” he asked bluntly.
    “No!” she said angrily, glaring at him. “And that’s all you need to know, McCallum!”
    His hands on her arms relaxed, became caressing. He scowled down at her, searching for the right words.
    “Let me go!”
    “No.”
    He reached around her and relocked the truck. He helped her into his car without asking if she was ready to come with him, started it and drove straight to his house.
    She was numb with surprise. But she came out of her stupor when he pulled the car into his driveway and turned off the engine and lights. “Oh, I can’t,” she began quickly. “I have to go home!”
    Ignoring her protest, he got out and opened the door for her. She let him extricate her and lead her up onto his porch. Mack barked from inside, but once Sterling let them in and turned on the lights, he calmed the big dog easily.
    “You know Mack,” he told Jessica. “While you’re getting reacquainted, I’ll make another pot of coffee. If you need to wash your face, bathroom’s there,” he added, gesturing toward a room between the living room and the kitchen.
    Mack growled at Jessica. She would try becoming his friend later, but right now she wanted to bathe her hot face. She couldn’t really imagine why she’d allowed McCallum to bring her here, when it was certainly going to destroy her reputation if anyone saw her alone with him after midnight.
    By the time she got back to the living room, he had hot coffee on the coffee table, in fairly disreputable black mugs with faded emblems on them.
    “I don’t have china,” he said when she tried to read the writing on hers.
    “Neither do I,” she confessed. “Except, I do have two place settings of Havilland, but it’s cracked. It was my great-aunt’s.” She looked at him over her coffee cup. “I shouldn’t be here.”
    “Because it’s late and we’re alone?”
    She nodded.
    “I’m a cop.”
    “Well…yes.”
    “Your reputation won’t suffer,” he said, leaning back to cross his long legs. “If there’s one thing I’m not, it’s a womanizer, and everyone knows it. I don’t have women.”
    “You said you did,” she muttered.
    He looked toward her with wise, amused eyes. “ Did, yes. Not since I came back here. Small towns are hotbeds of gossip, and I’ve been the subject of it enough in my life. I won’t risk becoming a household word again just to satisfy an infrequent ache.”
    She drank her coffee quickly, trying to hide how much his words embarrassed her, as well as the reference to gossip. She had her own skeletons, about which he apparently knew nothing. It had been a long time ago, after all, and most of the people who knew about Jessica’s past had moved away or died. Sheriff Judd Hensley knew, but he wasn’t likely to volunteer information to McCallum. Judd was tight-lipped, and he’d been Jessica’s foremost ally at a time when she’d needed