Micah hadn’t intended to take Kylie Miller to bed.
For a week, she’d ditched every mark she’d conned before they got to the elevators. He even turned his back to her twice, giving her the opportunity to dash.
At the elevators, Micah extended his hand to shake. “It was lovely meeting you, Delilah.”
She looked at his hand, looked up into his eyes, and he could see the calculations running through her head while they stood there.
The elevator chimed beside them.
Kylie turned and stepped into the mirrored elevator, looked up at him with wary eyes, and then faced the doors as he’d punched a number high on the rows of buttons.
When she followed him into the elevator and then reached over, taking his hand, her breasts rising and falling under the fragile navy blue silk of her dress as she breathed more deeply, he was damned shocked.
She moved toward him a little but glanced at the black globe in the elevator’s corner and stopped.
Not an exhibitionist for the security cams. Okay. He wasn’t, either.
Maybe she planned to kidnap or extort him.
He had seen nothing over the past week to indicate that was her style.
Maybe he was blown.
No, that was ridiculous.
And yet, Kylie Miller was obviously connected. If anyone could trace his identity, it would be someone in the garbage business, so to speak.
At the door to his suite, Micah waved his phone in front of the sensor, and the door lock flashed green.
Inside, the entryway had a table topped with a vase of fresh flowers, some white and blue ones to match the furniture and carpeting and stuff.
Kylie turned as she meandered in, staring around at the suite. “Oh, wow.”
Micah shrugged. He stayed back from her, letting her acclimate because, for all she knew, he might be a serial killer who’d lured her to his lair.
Not that he was a serial killer. By definition, serial killers have killed three people on three different occasions, usually but not always in a premeditated or at least opportunistic way and usually for the thrill of it, so Micah wasn’t a serial killer.
Kylie wandered through the suite until she reached the windows overlooking the lights of Atlantic City in the night and the void of the Atlantic Ocean in the distance.
Micah stood behind her, close enough to encroach on her personal space. “So, Delilah, do you want to stay?”
She turned to face him, looking up. The top of her head only reached his shoulder. “Yes.”
Electricity surged through him. He wasn’t going to argue.
“I can order wine.” He took off his suit jacket, folded it over the back of a chair, and moved toward her. “Would you like champagne?”
She watched him take off his jacket like he was performing a striptease. “I’m fine. I don’t want more.”
He dragged his knuckles over her shoulder and down her arm. “I’m glad you want to stay.”
She stared out of the window.
Micah lifted her chin, bent, and brushed his lips over hers, the friction shuddering through him.
This was a spectacularly bad idea. Micah didn’t sleep with assets. No one in his position did. Sleeping with assets was right up there with divulging one’s real name or address, giving them a phone number for an unsecured phone, and adding them on damned social media. It was the sort of thing that could get one or both of them killed.
Even now, this woman might not be what she’d appeared to be after investigation and a week of surveillance. Micah had missed that her father was dead. She might be much more entwined in Salvatore Grande’s organization than Micah suspected.
She might be more than an Atlantic City con woman.
Yet the softness of her skin under his hands drove those qualms out of his mind, and Micah inhaled the soft fragrance of herbs in her hair and flowers on her bare shoulders.
His body tightened, holding back as he trickled his fingertips over her shoulders and down her arms.
Her tiny gasp against his lips jarred him like a gust of desert wind, and his fingers tightened on her upper arms before he forced himself to open his hands.
He moved toward her, bending to kiss her mouth, and she rested her hands lightly on his shoulders and curved her body against his.
Desire shot through him, his hands pressed her shoulders, his fingers palming her hip.
Too much.
Micah loosened his grip, backing off. Kylie certainly wasn’t a frail woman, but he shouldn’t be manhandling her within a few moments of the first time he’d kissed her.
He ran a finger under her chin, lifting her jaw so he could breathe on the skin of her throat and brush his lips over the delicate skin above her shoulder.
His hands clenched around her hips again, his fingers digging in before he forced himself to release her.
Kylie asked, “Why do you keep doing that, grabbing me and then letting go?”
Micah told her the truth. “I don’t want to scare you.”
She looked directly at him, her dark eyes hazy. “Go ahead. Scare me.”