Tempts Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

But one thing she did know was how to talk to people like they were important when they weren’t, and like they were no big deal when they were. It had been her experience that a lot of people who were used to being ass-kissed kind of liked it when someone didn’t treat them like they were made of spun sugar, ready to melt if you blew on them.
    “How come you hate parties?” she said in the cab Elliott had flagged for them. He’d said nothing to her in the past ten minutes while they had waited for the ride.
    “Who says I hate parties?”
    “Barry.”
    Elliott looked at her, finally. “Barry talks too much. I don’t hate parties. I mostly just get bored, that’s all. Everyone trying to impress everyone else. Like your friend from Louisiana.”
    “I just met the guy tonight. He’s hardly a friend.”
    “He invited you to his party next time he’s in town,” Elliott said darkly.
    She let her hand rest on his knee, squeezing gently. “He invited both of us. Don’t worry. I’ll go with you. Even if you are sort of an intolerable date.”
    Beneath her hand, the muscles went tight, bunching. He didn’t take her hand and throw it off him, but there was no doubt from the look on his face that he was considering it. She took it away. She didn’t need to chase.
    They said nothing else after that. When they pulled up in front of her building, she squeezed his knee again. “Walk me upstairs.”
    Elliott sighed, but didn’t protest. Simone couldn’t stop herself from smiling, not that she let him see her, as she led him to the elevator. She was giving him a hard time about being a pain in the ass, which was true. He totally was. But she’d been on worse dates, with bigger assholes than Elliott Anderson, and the fact was that his terse attitude intrigued her more than it made her mad. Oh, yeah, he’d been a little brusque tonight. Impolite, though immediately recognizing it when she’d pointed it out. Acknowledging it, if not contritely at least sincerely. She was having a helluva time figuring him out.
    She liked that.
    Maybe that made her kind of sick, but that wasn’t anything she didn’t already know about herself. She’d always been drawn to arrogant men, the ones who thought they knew best. Those were the ones who could give her what she craved. The problem with men like that was they were also the ones who felt like they had the right to tell her what to do.
    Elliott was different. She’d known that for a while, watching him bring the parade of blondes into his office. Fucking them on his desk, sometimes without so much as a kiss beforehand. The way his hands always found their way into their hair, pulling. The roughness with which he handled them. But she’d watched him do other things in that office, too, things that had told her a lot more about his personality even than the way he fucked.
    She’d seen him clean his desk phone with an antiseptic wipe and eat Chinese food from a container with chopsticks he pulled from a wooden case out of his desk drawer. She’d watched him bent over his computer, scowling, and she’d watched him with his cell phone pressed to his ear, face alight with laughter. She’d seen him working and playing. It was kind of creepy, actually, how much she knew about him from watching him after hours. What would happen if he knew everything she knew about him, she thought as she pushed the fourth-floor button and watched him lean against the interior elevator railing across from her.
    “I’m at the end of the hall.”
    “Of course you are,” Elliott said in a half-weary voice, though he followed her. “I guess you expect me to make sure you get inside okay, too.”
    “Yes.” Simone bit back another smile.
    “Do you want me to go inside with you?” He asked as she fit her key into the lock and pushed open the heavy wooden door. “Make sure there’s no serial killer lurking behind the shower curtain, that sort of thing?”
    He might be a pain in the ass, but that dry